The TRIP!

Just over three weeks ago the hornblower clan took a trip to Europe. Prepare yourself for pictures and rambling stories of how it all went. I expect to milk this experience for blog content for months ;)

The details of it all were as follows:

April 23 evening: flight to London Heathrow's awful Terminal 5*; arrive (late) afternoon of April 24
April 30 am - Eurostar to Paris
May 3 pm - overnight train to Venice
May 7 noon - train to Florence
May 11 am - train to Rome
May 14 - fly to London, (get groped by security at Heathrow), fly to Vancouver

I'm just a teensy bit excited here.
We took the Skytrain/Canada Line to the airport - simple & a good training ground for managing metro's with luggage.

Still grinning, having been shoehorned into this supposed seat. BA cattle class is really cramped!
But the 3 of us are enjoying our vegetarian meal (curry in that case). Bonus part of ordering special meals on flights is that you get fed first, ahead of everyone else. Notice H is glued to screen. He stayed up almost all night watching movies.

Some of us are looking a bit worse for wear by morning. Mercifully nobody caught a pic of me as it would have been very scary. I fly drugged out of my mind on anti nausea meds & by the time I arrive, I'm a drooling mess.

First sight of land! England!!!

   

London fly over.

We've arrived at the hotel!!!!

*This however, requires a bit more comment because the time from landing to the time of arriving at the hotel was brutally long. Insanely long. You may have heard that BA's boss had a HUGE hissy fit at the UK gov't about it.

We can certainly assert that we waited for at least 2 hours - maybe more? - to clear Immigration. I don't wear a watch so I'm vague on this but it was long enough for Roo to drain the touchpad battery playing Angry Birds in the line. Long enough that some airport staff arrived & started handing out bottles of free water because it was hot, stuffy, and people were looking like fainting was imminent. Amelia was certainly considering it if it would mean a bump to the head of the line (Amelia is a fainter anyway so she wouldn't really be faking it...)

We were in a HUGE line with at least 2 other large plane loads of people - a flight from South America & I'm guessing a flight from Israel (based solely on appearances, cause I'm shallow that way). If the planes were 767 size, that's probably ~300 people per flight & it surely felt like there were way over 500 people in that line up... Roo, who is tall enough to see over most people (especially in Europe where he found most of the locals quaintly little) was able to see over the crowds and see that at times there were only 2 border officials working our line. Then it went up to 3, then back down to 2.... & then he entered the meditative zone of Angry Birds. All things pass &so did this line up but when I read about huge row about Heathrow not being Olympics ready, I definitely was nodding my head.

I got a kick out of a very dapper US businessman (suit, tie, briefcase, gleaming wingtip shoes - the whole uniform) about 10 people ahead of us who spent large chunks of time on his cell phone bawling out his English hosts. "I'll tell you where I am! I'm in your goddamned airport!" while we all nodded our heads in silent support.

Anyway, we finally got through & then, after a pretty simple ride on a train, there we were at our hotel near near Paddington, & managed to pop out for a quick stroll before finding a snack and crashing into bed.

OMG, squeal! It's a red double decker!

First dog I saw but I was so slow at getting the camera that I only caught it from the back. It was the first of many cavaliers I'd see in Europe.

Oh look! A dog thing! (Hyde Park)