Up and Away

I’ve never been a big fan of the saying that “God gives you just the right amount of trouble that you can handle,” but it is true that She gave me exactly the number of things I could check off my list before taking off for six weeks of travel. With a flight at 8:00 pm at night, I woke up and got to work on laundry, packing, sending out invoices, paying all bills, whittling e-mail to zero, packing up a box and two envelopes of books and sending them off at the Post Office, eating all the perishables in the refrigerator, calling my two daughters and sister, booking a flight to China, voting by mail, buying a plug adaptor and yet more. The one snafu was my haircutter being closed (on a Tuesday? Why?) and having to scramble to find another, which I did. 

 

So off we arrived at the airport and I had some creeping sense that something was going to go wrong and sure enough, suddenly the U.K, demands an ETA before you can enter. With no line ahead or behind us, two helpful travel agents walked us through the application on our phone and we were able to board the plane, some $56 poorer. But then the guardian angels made up for it by giving my wife and I a whole row of three seats each and the rare luxury of a horizontal flight, without having to pay the $10,000 or so (I kid you not!) that first-class people had to pay. 

 

A few first impressions upon arriving in London: 

• Dickens and Conan Doyle wrote of London as cold, bleak, grey and foggy. Coming off the Heathrow Express train and out into the air at Paddington Station, it was a hot 90 degrees and sunny.

 

• Cobblestones are charming until you have to wheel a suitcase over them for several hundred yards. 

 

• E-sim is an easy way to keep access to your phone while traveling— up until the moment (after you’ve paid for it) you try to install it. 

 

• We are exactly in the place where we met our Australian friends Margie and Paul last year and wandered around the charming (and surprising) neighborhood of Little Venice.

 

• The waiter at our dinner pizza place asked if we were from Canada. When we told him U.S., he said with a smile, “Well, I just wanted to give you a chance to pretend.”

 

• That restaurant had a first for this “half-a-bottle-of-beer-and -then cork-it- until-tomorrow guy" (me)— you could get a pint, 1/2  pint or 1/3 pint! The latter was perfect for me and cost a mere 2.8 pounds. 

 

• The bill at the end had a Table Service charge, so no need to leave a tip. And the charge was 12%. Yeah!

 

So back in the land of Mind the Gap and Look Right (for cars when crossing the street that could hit you). Both metaphors for our Canadian I mean, American, experience. Having to daily mind the gap between our American promise and our dismal reality and to look to the Right to avoid their dangerous careening vehicles. 

 

Happy to say, we’re in the U.K.!