....And They're Off!

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Wednesday, June 12 / Thursday, June 13

 

I was surprised at how good the dinner on the flight was as well as how old the flight attendants were.  They were all in their 50s and 60s!  Our landing in Chicago was in doubt due to severe weather, but O’Hare Airport was reopened after we circled it for half an hour and we easily made our connecting flight.  Those storm clouds looked otherworldly while we circled O'Hare at 30,000 feet in the evening sun.  We got to Heathrow about 11:15 and then through customs and into central London without a hitch by 1:00.  

We killed a few minutes on the river bank on our walk from Waterloo Station to our flat but still arrived a few minutes early.  Our vacation rental landlord, David, was very nice about that and showed us around the flat before leaving us to enjoy it.  It was a modern two bedroom/two bath flat but was still somewhat small by American standards.  Still, there's no denying its great location virtually on the river just behind the OXO Tower.  It also was one of the rare vacation rentals in central London to include some kind of area outside, in this case a deck with lots of potted plants.  Many things took getting used to like the door locks to the flat and the oven controls.  Besides having Celsius rather than Farenheight settings the oven was made even more puzzling due to the mysterious icons on the controls.

 

We had a nice mid-afternoon meal at the Studio 6 restaurant at nearby Gabriel's Wharf and walked around for a couple of hours seeing some tourist places that we'd get back to when time permitted. There was no shortage of other tourists; I had hoped that we might first take a ride on the London Eye but the queue for it discouraged that for the time being.  It was a very blustery day, as Marnie's hair demonstrates below.

We picked up our London Passes that will cover the admission fees for most of the places we’ll see and briefly took-in Covent Gardens before taking the hydrogen powered RV1 bus to Sainsbury for groceries.  We’d make use of this bus route several times during our stay as it runs every ten minutes from Covent Gardens with a stop immediately in front of our flat on its way to the Tower of London.

We sat out on the deck polishing off what little remained in a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream and then had salmon for dinner.  I was relieved that the salmon turned out so well given the mystery of the oven controls.  Despite neither of us getting any sleep on the plane, we managed to stay up until 9 pm before going to bed, although I woke up four hours later and couldn't get back to sleep.