Day 15- London

Friday, May 7 (Day 15)

We had the leisure to sleep in a little bit (as in waking up at 8am which is still early for me). Lisa and I started packing our bags to leave. We were also trying to do laundry before we started our tour and the dryer wasn’t working well. And it doesn’t help that we left our clothes outside last night while at dinner and got wet so they needed to be re-dried.

The taxi picked us up at 12:30 and we got to the airport around 1. Our fight to London was at 5:30. We were checking in and the lady told us that we should transfer to the 1:30 flight because they didn’t know what the volcano’s next move was going to be. We all said that we were fine for the 5:30 flight but she basically pushed us to go on the 1:30 flight. We agreed and she starting transferring our tickets (for free) and taking all of our paper work and weighing our bags. She was doing this all in a hurry because it was already 1:00 and the gate closed at 1:10… we still needed to go through security and get to our terminal.

So she just took our papers and printed out our new tickets and told us to quickly get to the gate. The line for security was pretty long and we were trying to ask people if we could go in front of them because we were late but most of them didn’t understand English, including the guards. So we waited in line and when 3 out of the 5 went through, we RAN through the airport to our gate, which was up some stairs, down a hall, a tram ride, some more stairs, and another hall. WE FINALLY MADE IT THERE with 10 minutes to spare! But it didn’t look like anyone was boarding yet. We found out that the plane was late getting in so our flight was delayed. Go figure. I guess that was our workout for the day.

After about an hour, we boarded the plane. Once on the plane, we waited yet another 2 hours before the plane took off. There was some kind of traffic jam on the runway. Lisa and I were sitting next to an Italian lady and her 1 ½ year old son. He was Italian and Dutch and was learning 3 languages. It amazes me how behind Americans are in the world. The little boy was cute but it wasn’t fun when it was crying a screaming and having to get up to go to the bathroom.

We finally arrived in London! We were really excited and went to baggage claim to get our bag to find out that… apparently our bags didn’t make it on the plane! Now what!!

We went to the British Airways counter to get things figured out and we filled out a lost/misplaced baggage claim. They so “generously,” as Erica put it, gave us a bag with travel shampoo, body gel, lotion, toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, and an XL, very see-through white t-shirt. How generous!!

After getting all of that done, we bought a “tube” (subway) ticket to go to our hotel. We were on this for about an hour, maybe 50 minutes. We got to our hotel (The Royal National) and at first they couldn’t find our reservation. Great- another thing to deal with. After 20 minutes or so, we finally got a room. We put all of our stuff in our rooms (Lisa and I, and Erica, Paula, and Carli). We were hungry by this point so we set out to find food. The guy at the concierge suggested a good place for fish n chips and we went searching for it. His directions were literally, “Go out of the hotel, go left, right, left, right and you’ll see it.” Helpful. We did end up finding it, but the prices were a bit much for us. So we went back to the pub that was adjacent to our hotel, “The London Pub.” This was a really fun place- the bartenders were really nice and they played American music. Plus, the food was pretty decently priced, too. The five of us ordered fish n chips and three of us had a beer and the other two had a Smirnoff cooler. The food was delicious! We finished the food, ordered another drink, and hung out there for a while. We were all invited to go bowling with the bartenders and we wanted to go BUT we had nothing to change into because we didn’t have our bags and we were really tired from traveling. So, we left and went up to our rooms to go to bed.