My USA trip 2024 (part 1)

[Devil's Advocate]

I guess the reason larger airports like Heathrow don't do this is the amount of resources it would consume, given the finite space and how busy they are already.

Heathrow is half airport and half shopping mall with limited room for expansion. They make it pretty clear they want everyone to stay in the shopping section as long as possible and only advance toward the gate when more shopping would risk delaying the flight. That is the opposite of what Preclearance would do for them and they already have all the traffick they can handle (and then some).

I tend to dislike long flights in coach class

Same here. My longest nonstop was 16.5 hours but that isn't even top ten these days. Qantas is planning nonstop flights around 20 hours by 2026. I prefer to separate ocean crossings into multiple shorter flights but the market seems to be moving away from that.

Link: https://www.afar.com/magazine/longest-flights-in-the-world

To the unitiated and uninformed, this would to them be a very reasonable question. And an opportunity to educate.

If a border official is playing dumb or passive aggressive it's probably not because they want to be educated on their own country. Say anything that triggers them and your trip is over, possibly without recourse. This goes double for Canadian border agents.

 

[Bob Dylan]

The closer you can get to the Earth the better the trip. In '74 I hitchhiked from Vancouver, B.C. to
Prince Edward Island. I would not trade that experience for any or all flights across the continent.

That's a Looooong trip, even on a Plane,Train or Bus!

I did a similar trip from San Diego to NYC back in the 60s, and it's still one of the Good Travel Memories I have!

 

[Literalman]

Since you asked about customs and immigration elsewhere: the only other country I routinely visit is the Philippines, my wife's native place. You have to go through immigration entering and leaving, and entering you must fill out e-travel before boarding a flight to the Philippines but not more than 72 hours ahead. It's supposed to take 10 minutes, allegedly, but it took me an hour this year. The stupid program kept changing my citizenship from US to Zimbabwe. Two years ago it wanted the date of our arrival, which I tried typing, picking from the program's calendar, or yelling at it. It kept telling me that it had to be a date. I started to think I would not get onto the plane for Manila, but eventually it acknowledged that October something, 2022, was a date. So this year I did e-travel the morning of departure for our first flight (just under the 72-hour limit) and got to suffer through it in the comfort of our home. Once I got to immigration in Manila, though, the clerk called up my e-travel record and I was done in about one minute.

Philippines customs just waves me through, and US customs in Honolulu (where we have stayed overnight the past couple of years to break up the trip) has been quick and easy. Philadelphia, however, where we entered the US a few years ago, had huge lines, and we didn't understand one of the questions (did we bring food with us from the Philippines?) or rather what it covered; we had a few packaged items we bought in a supermarket and carried with us, and a customs helper didn't think the food was restricted (we had to answer the questions at a computer terminal; in Honolulu we spoke with a human).

And another question for you: it seems you were trying to keep your expenses low; didn't last-minute flights after canceling train reservations get expensive?