Quick immigration at Gatwick Airport to AirBNB

So we reached Gatwick Airport, London, safe and sound with Norweigian Airlines (do read my other post about the review of the airlines) and we had also booked a car with Sixt car rental for our 6 nights in London which we booked with Ryanair car rental.

At Gatwick Airport, the immigration and bag collection was pretty smooth. But with 3 kids and 11 bags (5 luggage and 6 hand carry items) it was super tough. The kids were super though. Mustansir and Shabbir were both soldiering on and helping with the bags (do read their blogs here at http://mustansir.topiwalla.com and http://shabbir.topiwalla.com) but Batul had already had enough and was insisting we carry her. Anyway, we landed at about 3.45pm and we estimated that we would be out of the airport by 5.30pm with a 1.5 hour drive to our place.  We were so wrong. Not because of any fault of Gatwick airport but because we were slow ourselves. This is how our experience at Gatwick was like:

3.45pm –  leave the plane and walk 15 minutes to the immigration
4.00pm – reach immigration and start filling up cards and toilet break
4.20pm – join queue
4.50pm – finish immigration process
5.20pm – load all bags onto 2 trolleys
5.40pm – reach Sixt booth (by the way we had to go to some temporary booth nearer to us actually as the other terminal was under construction)
6pm – get keys to our car. A Seat Leon hatchback. The car was nice but this is when we realised the boot might be too small for our 11 bags! Oh boy.
6.15pm – try to see 2 other larger cars, a Merc and a BMW. Both boots are not large enough for our bags and actually offer less space actually in the boot then the Seat Leon.
6.40pm – No choice but to take the Seat Leon. Somehow, we managed to squeeze all the bags and people into the car.
7pm – Finish up paper work and we were out of the airport.

Imagine. 3 hours versus 1.5 hours which was our estimate. And not because anything actually held us back due to queues or whatever.

The drive to the AirBNB place we took was also quite nice. Arwa was used to driving on the right hand side and so starting in London was not so difficult. She was quickly able to adapt and I must say, this was important as she was to be the person driving in our entire trip moving forward.

There was unfortunately a pretty bad jam along the M25 as we were entering the M4 and this caused to be delayed by another 45 minutes more.

Eventually, we ended up reaching the apartment at about 9pm instead of our intended 7pm. Fortunately for us, the AirBNB host who was leasing the whole apartment to us stayed around and waited for us.

The apartment was fantastic. We had 2 rooms with double beds. 1 for us and 1 for the kids, Batul  still sleeps with us. The living area, the kitchen, everything was great. It was also easy to find Halal food nearby and it helped so much that the Host had utensils and some base stuff we could use to cook like condiments and oils.

We really thank Uzma and Zaynah for their wonderful apartment (https://www.airbnb.com.sg/rooms/21495818) and hope that we we can come stay with you again soon!

 

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