Landing in London

Travel day one: complete. WHEW!

It's blog time!!!

Our departure from PDX was sad, but easy comparatively speaking. We flew in a little tiny prop plane which wasn't good. I tend to get motion sickness on little planes. I should have known to just take the Dramamine, but I thought it would be okay. It was fine, but I was left with a yucky feeling in my stomach and a wicked headache.

The Vancouver airport is really pretty! Very nicely laid out, very clean and lots of shops and restaraunts to explore. Our flight was delayed nearly 3 hours because of thunder storms in Asia, so instead of having a 2 hour layover it was almost 5 hours.

Eric waiting at YVR.

The flight from Vancouver to London was the longest flight of my life! I sat next to a very nice South African man who lives in southern England. He had some helpful tips on how to navigate the hugeness that is London.

After disembarking in London we waited for an hour in the customs line. We got our baggage and exchanged some currency. It took a while to figure out the Undergroud, but we did it and were on our way to our hotel.

I want you to keep in mind that I'm extremely tired, hungry and thirsty at this point. We've been eating nothing but airplane food and fast food so I'm not feeling very well either. We were standing on the underground chuckling at the "mind the gap" reminders when this little family gets on the train. Eric moved aside so the man could push the stroller into the car. After about one stop the man steps up and puts his face about 2 inches from Eric's and just stares at him. When Eric asked if he could help him and what he wanted, the mand didn't respond. He was just trying to intimidate him or something. It was way creepy and I was thankful that we only had a few more stops.

When we got off the train, I lost it. We found a sopt to stand where we could organize our stuff and I broke down in tears. I was shaking from the creepiness of the nasty dude. We discovered that you have to tap your Oyster card on your way out of the underground too. The guard chased us down and explained it to us. By the time we got out into the street I was a wreck. We stood on the curb while Eric tried to hail a cab and I just cried.

The cab driver was great. He said in his 10 years of driving cabs he'd never taken anyone out "so far" to their hotel. Whatever. It wasn't that far... at least I don't feel like it was. He was helpful in calming me down and reassuring that the creepy dude was a "whack job". I think I tipped him too much, but whatever.

Our ghetto "hotel" room.

Our "hotel" is very ghetto. It's more like a hostel than a hotel. It has a kitchen down the hall equipped with everything we'll need including a washer and dryer! The bathroom is also down the hall which is a complete bummer.

We walked to a grocery store for some basic food stuffs. I made a lame attempt at dinner by cooking some pasta and adding a prepackaged sauce. Thankfully I found peppermint tea, which should soothe my stomach.

We'll have to do quite a bit of walking tomorrow to get where we want to be, but I don't really care about that at this point. We're here and I'm looking forward to sleeping in a bed (regardless of how small and ghetto it is).





I'm sure this isn't a very well organized blog post and that my grammar isn't very good. For that, I appologize. Hopefully after a good night's sleep I'll be more cheerful and organized about writing. I'm going to take a shower and wash the stench of this day off me!