OK. Now I'm disappointed. VERY disappointed. I went to all the effort of printing out my latest bank statements, printing out accomodation details, filling out (most of) my VISA Waiver Form and mentally preparing to unHiltonize myself until I pass through US Customs, and, well, I passed through security easily, without even a queue. Yes, I took "easy to remove" shoes and didn't bother wearing a belt.
Now comes the really disappointing bit - it took a whole < 5 minutes to get through Customs, and about 4 minutes of that was the queue. Customs was easy - wasn't asked if I had anything to declare (which, in hindsight, was probably good - I wasn't bringing anything illegal into the USA, but probably would have declared some things that the TSA would have taken offence to!), just asked why I was entering, what the business reason was, when I was leaving, how many days that was from now (and I could even see his calculator - he could have worked it out himself), and then was fingerprinted, photographed, stamped and sent on to to wait for my 11:30 flight from LAX to Las Vegas.
Yup - I now had arrived on the inside of America at about 07:45 after getting my baggage, getting through security and Customs and saying "hooroo" to John and Susan, my neighbors and the couple I slept with for the past 13 or so hours. And I had over 3 hours to pass - I decided that with a 7:00 scheduled landing, about 4.5h between landing and departing was a sensible timeframe, which was confirmed by quite a few others I knew who had done a similar thing recently.
So I wander up to LAX NWA departures to check the flight and it is now saying that I have a 12:00pm departure - not so bad in the overall scheme of things.
So, at 1:30pm we finally departed after waiting for 2 delayed flights that we had to interconnect with. *Sigh*.
At least I finally got in the air and on the way to Vegas!
Regards,
The Outspoken Wookie
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