Day 1 - London - NY - Washington

We had been waiting for this trip with abated breath. We were going to travel to the US as a family for the first time. 

There was a lot of planning done, redone and done again to finally come up with this trip that will suit our needs. We had got the flight tickets early using both our vouchers. But we did not finalise the hotels until last night. In fact we still have one more night to book to book, which we will do in the middle of our trip.

We had to take care of a few things before we left. Ruchir and Abhishek have kindly agreed to take care of Jarvis when we are away. He will be staying at Ruchir's place for a week and then the remaining 4 days at Abhishek's place. 

We finished all our packing, which we started late last evening, and after having a light breakfast, we took Jarvis out for a walk and dropped him off at Ruchir's place. I had booked a cab from 247 cabs. They arrived on time and we set off to the airport. 

Reached T5 at Heathrow well on time and finished our checkin and security checks. We had food from Itsu and waiting to board our flight. BA177 was on time, we had managed to get all 4 seats in a row. It was a smooth flight. We landed at JFK at about 4PM in the afternoon local time. 

I had got a sim card from Lyca mobile with 60GB of date and I had already activated it. It came to life in US and we got network and connectivity instantly. I had paid £35 for the sim card. All of us were able to connect to my hotspot and use the internet on their devices. 

The security check was long and agonising. It took us over 90 mins to get out of there. Once we collected our bags from the conveyor belt we headed over to the sky train to get off at Imperial Circle where all the car rental companies were located. We took the Jamaica line to get there. We signed in and got our rental car from Hertz. It was a Honda CRV. 

We carefully started our drive to Washington. It was still bright and it helped to settle in into driving in NY. We took the toll road option and took the I95 to reach Washington in around 4 hours 30 mins. We stopped on the way to get some coffee and snacks and then we were off. We drive about 3 hours straight to reach Washington. 

We checked in to our hotel and tried to sleep at the earliest. We were exhausted, except for Niki who had been sleeping all along the drive and was now full of energy and wanted to do all sorts of things. 

We did not even bother to eat anything as we were all very tired and just slept.