Editor’s Note: Sorry for the seriously out of order execution, but I had no net access for most of the trip, so I am posting these in order of the visit, which roughly corresponds to the order of my completion of them.
Today was our first day in England. Our plane arrived at Gatwick airport, which is 23 miles from London, at 8am. Since we knew we probably couldn’t check in yet, we took our time and tried to figure out the cheapest way into London. We wound up taking the Gatwick Express, which is a train that leaves every 15 minutes or so from Gatwick and takes 35 minutes to reach Victoria Station in downtown London. We paid 12 pounds (almost $24)/ticket at a counter in the airport, but I think the tickets were only 8 pounds if you bought them on the train… sigh.
Anyway, the train ride was nice and a good way to get acclimated to the greenery of Britain.
Notes about the train: Lots of graffitti on the train track walls… so much that I was impressed. Literally every square foot for most of those 23 miles had graffitti. Christi saw a red fox on an embankment while the train was stopped and waiting outside a station… pretty neat. We got to Victoria Station and took a cab to the hotel. The cabs look like cars from the 30s, even though they are thoroughly modern, which gives a lot of space in the passenger compartment to hold your luggage but basically the things have no trunk at all. However, we had 3 big bags, plus personal stuff and we didn’t have a problem fitting in the cab. When we got to the hotel (Grosvenor House, pronounced Grovsnor House or some such by the Brits) it was about 10am and we found out that we couldn’t check in yet. However we checked our bags and went for a walk. We walked down past the US embassy, which is only a block away and took a pic of JC in front of a statue of General Eisenhower.
They have the streets all blocked off and guys with HK sub-machine guns guarding it, I guess because of terrorism fears. We walked over to Hyde Park, which is right across the street from the hotel and wandered around. There were strange guys standing on soap boxes every few yards in a certain area of the park, expounding their philosophic or political views and instead of people edging away from the shouters as if they were crazy (like they would be doing in the US), each speaker had a group of listeners gathered around them, listening, heckling, having fun. I wanted to stay and listen to the socialist a bit, since I always like the idea of getting paid to do nothing, but the weather had turned a bit cool (clouds came in and the temp dropped 5C just like that) so we headed back to the hotel. There was a big stage set up in the park, which we later learned was for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were performing that night. Our hotel was close enough that we could hear them fairly well 🙂 We wound up getting to check in at noon and we were all passed out by 1pm (not good for jet lag, but we’d all been up well more than 24 hours at that point).
We slept on and off until 7pm and then got up and showered and went to dinner. We tried to go to a pub for dinner, but all the tables were taken, so we wound up going to a little French cafe next door. Dinner was Fish and Chips for JC and Christi and a Croque Monsieur for me (which was actually much better than the ones I’ve had in France). After that we got some bottled water from a nearby store and headed home. I wanted to go back out to a pub for a beer, and although JC and I gave it the old college try, the concert had let out and since it was Sunday night at around 11pm, there were no pubs we could find open… oh well. Wimbledon tomorrow.
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