Washington DC; Friday, 24 August, 2018

I had a leisurely afternoon passing through the airport and eventually out to the satellite terminal to board my flight, which was smooth an uneventful all the way across the Atlantic to Baltimore. I should have known it was all going too smoothly.

Baltimore has one terminal that handles all international flights, so I’d – perhaps foolishly – thought it would make the process of landing in the US slightly easier as they would concentrate staff in the one terminal to handle immigration. I was about to be proved wrong.

We were all made to queue up to use the kiosks to complete our customs declaration and then every single person was directed into the secondary queue to be re-checked by immigration officials, this included all the Canadian and American citizens from the flight. To add to the joy there was just two immigration staff on duty so the queue, which already had the back half of another flight from Germany in it, took nearly 90 minutes to get through before I finally made it to the border.

With virtually no questions and just one photo and a set of prints my passport was stamped and I was over the border and into the US. The one upside of taking so long to get through was that all the luggage had arrived by the time I got through to baggage reclaim so I was able to pick mine straight up, quickly pass through the customs queue and exit into the terminal building.

I then had a lengthy walk back through the terminal building to the desk where my pre-booked shuttle was picking up from, and by the time I made it to the desk I’d missed the previous shuttle and then had another 45 minute wait for the next one into town.

The shuttle made several drop-offs in the outskirts of Baltimore before finally heading down the Interstate into Washington to do another drop off before finally pulling up to my hotel nearly 4 hours after I’d originally landed into the airport.

I checked into the hotel and immediately went to bed.