We stayed up most of the night before leaving for the airport on Friday morning in an attempt to get ourselves adjusted to GMT before even leaving Seattle. It’s unclear if it helped the cause, made things worse, or somewhere in between. What is clear is that our trip started off on a negative note.
After arriving at the airport nearly three hours before our domestic flight to San Francisco, we encountered our first setback while trying to check in. It seems that when I bought the tickets I had used our full names for the travel documents. This of course would be correct except for the fact that Mrs. fall-line’s passport is still under he maiden name, and consequently did not match the name on the tickets. This is why you don’t by plane tickets at 11pm online in haste without fully thinking things through, I remind myself now. Of course this problem was my fault at the core, but United really fell all over-themselves to handle it in the worst possible fashion.
Nearly and hour went by and we were still watching a very unhappy and unfriendly lady in United Airlines customer service half fix our problem, and half throw a tantrum about fixing our problem, we got what we needed and headed to the plane. I really thought we were going to have to give this lady a juice box and a blankie to get her to help us before we missed the flight. We made it with 5 minutes to spare. (-3 to United.. this is a trend that will continue)
Once onboard, the travel from Seattle to London via San Francisco was fairly uneventful, thankfully. We even received some nice service from the flight crew of the SFO -> LHR leg. (+1 to United)
We arrived in London at a few minutes to 7 in the morning on Sunday, the city was quiet and peaceful. After weighing our options for travel from Heathrow to the city, we hopped on a coach which took us to within a couple of miles of the hotel for only £4 ($9) each. This hour long ride gave us a good opportunity to sit back and observe the city in a way I haven’t seen it before. 15 hours after leaving Seattle, we were exhausted from our traveling but excited to be on the ground in the UK.
Upon locating the hotel and dropping our luggage for the day, we headed out to see the city with the little time we had. We walked along the Thames, saw the sights and visited a few of the cities hot-spots during the daylight hours. I was particularly impressed by Westminster Abbey after experiencing the great multitude of British and world history quite literally interred within.
For the rest of the day and evening, we tried to keep ourselves awake by walking…and walking… and (as Mrs. fall-line will remind me with a scowl)… walking some more. Our shoes and our dress were not appropriate for a 4 mile night time walk through London (in March), but in retrospect I’m glad to have had the experiences we did that evening. London is incredibly expensive (especially with the weak dollar we have at the moment), the people aren’t terribly friendly, and it’s noisy and dirty. Pretty much what you would expect from a global population center. We were eager to get on the plane the next day to Edinburgh.
London on Sunday, March 18th 2007.
More photos:
http://flickr.com/photos/fall-line/sets/72157600032138777/
Scotland, Travel