The nice thing about a flight that leaves at 11pm - you have all day to finish up last-minute packing. ‘All day’ is a lot shorter than it would at first seem. We left our car at SQ’s office in Reston and took a cab to Dulles from there, after being a bit late leaving (due to some last-minute blogging by me). We are flying Virgin Atlantic - bonus!! I had talked SQ into taking our rolling carry-on for all the electronic equipment he was carting over. And he has a RIDICULOUS amount of it! You’d think we were headed to a gadget convention. When we were checking in, the Virgin agent told us it was too big, and way too heavy. SQ was irritated at me now, I guess rightly so. So he pulled out his Digital SLR and the laptop, and Virgin was nice enough to give him a tote bag. He checked everything else….without a security lock. The whole experience with Virgin Atlantic so far has been great. We got to Dulles 3 hours early, so of course the security line only took us 10 minutes. I ended up buying SQ a TSA lock so he wouldn’t drag me all over London looking for one, instead of enjoying the sites. Then we had to just sit, waiting, waiting, waiting to board the plane.
The plane was completely full, and the seats in coach pretty tight. The lady sitting next to me had no sense of personal space and elbowed me several times, shifting all over the place. The plus is that each seat had it’s own TV on the back of the seat in front of you. There are pillows and blankets in each seat, and they give you headphones and a ‘personal care’ kit complete with toothbrush/toothpaste combo. I attempted to sleep, it’s hard to do on a plane when the seat doesn’t go back very far and your head bobs around. The flight was about 7 hours, and we were a bit late getting to the gate at Heathrow. The walk to Immigration and Customs was quite long, then we had to stand in line there for about an hour. The agents asked a lot of questions, but are at least nice about it. All of our luggage made it, which was an unexpected bonus these days. It was fairly easy to navigate out to the taxi stand, and no lines to get one. Probably because we are the only idiots not taking the Tube. The taxis are totally adorable though, clean and quite large. The fare to our hotel was outrageous, around $100. We are staying at the Marriott County Hall, which is right on the Thames River and in front of the London Eye. This is a place we would no way be able to afford, we used up all our Marriott points just to get this one night here. The location is great, but our particular room has a really crappy view of the trash courtyard. The hotel doesn’t seem busy so not sure why we got stuck in this room. But it’s quite large, and clean, and has tons of room for all of us. The staff are very nice, typical for a Marriott…except not that timely on getting our luggage to us. They were supposed to bring it up right away, and half hour later we still didn’t have it. I called down to request it again, and another 45 minutes went by. I was really irritated as it was now almost 4:30pm and we didn’t want to waste anymore time waiting for our bags. Our time here is really limited and we had purchased tickets for the Big Bus Tour in advance. Now I was getting nervous we wouldn’t have enough time to do this, it’s about a two hour round-trip tour, and we were supposed to meet Kirstin and James for dinner at 8pm by the Eye. I finally had to go down and show up in person to get them to bring up the bags.
We left for the bus tour, there was supposed to be a stop just in front of the hotel, but they were having a problem finding our reservation, so we were delayed another 20 minutes or so. Not much was going our way in terms of timing so far. Next time in London I need to remember to allow most of a day for travel transfers. Syd really wanted to go to Harrod’s, and the bus tour makes a stop right in front, but at this point there was no time. We sat on top (no cover) and had a great view of all the sights. The live commentator was great, full of good stories.
We didn’t make it back to the hotel until 7:15pm, which didn’t leave us much time to get ready for dinner, and we were pretty wind-blown by then. We met up with Kirstin and James (our first time meeting him!), and headed over to an adorable place called Giraffe for dinner, which was quite popular based on the crowds there. The weather was gorgeous so we decided to eat outside on the patio. And no rain so far! The menu is really diverse, and I decided to get the Grilled “Tandoori Murghi” burger, which was grilled chicken marinated in yogurt sauce, topped with mango chutney, onion, lettuce and tomato. SQ ordered the Chicken Schnitzel BLT, and Syd had a beef teriyaki stir fry. The food tasted as good as it smelled, really yummy. Kirstin and I shared a bottle of Pinot Noir, while James and SQ slugged Red Stripe most of the evening. Around 12:20am we realized we were the only customers left. I think this was the first time I’ve ‘closed a restaurant down’ for the night. We could have sat and talked with them all night, it’s too bad we aren’t spending more time in London.
Overall first impressions of London: The town is quite lovely, incredibly old, and it feels comfortable and accessible. Kind of reminds me of Washington, DC in a lot of ways, but much larger. The buildings are all not very tall so it feels very open. The neighborhoods are beautiful and it was great fun to people-watch from the top of the bus as it moved through different parts of the city.
We are going to attempt to wake up early enough tomorrow morning to take Syd to Harrod’s before catching the train to Edinburgh. We’ll see how that works out…
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