Sunday Nov. 21, 2004 View Sunday's Pictures

We left Rochester on Saturday night at 7:10 PM. Our connection on United was through Washington Dulles and went very smoothly. Susan had booked us in business class with frequent flyer award tickets. The 777 was very nice and had seats which you could position every which way and an LCD screen with movies, music selection, and a moving map with flight information display. At times, the display showed a tail wind of 125 Kt. so we made very good time crossing the Atlantic. As we were climbing away from Washington the pilot announced that we were 6h 30m to London.

We landed at Heathrow at 10 am and had not problems with customs or luggage. We took the Heathrow Express train to Paddington station which is a couple of miles from our apartment. The cab ride to the apartment took about 15-20 minutes and I was surprised at how different everything looks. The streets seem to be arranged at random, and the buildings and cars look strange. The real estate agent met us at the apartment and showed us the place and told us what was nearby. The apartment is very nice, there is a bedroom, bath, living room, kitchen, laundry, and foyer. It is on a dead end street with several other apartment buildings and is one block from a street of shops and restaurants and 3 blocks from a tube stop in both directions. The kitchen is furnished and we hope to cook for the girls one or two nights.

We called Laura and arranged to meet her at the tube stop as she knew where that was. She is a 15-20 minute walk south of the apartment. She looks great and we spent time catching up then went around the corner to an Italian restaurant for lunch. In the restaurant we saw a couple where the guy was wearing an RIT sweatshirt. They were from Chicago and his parents still live in Rochester. Small world.

Laura seems to spend all of her spare time riding buses around London, she seemed to know the route of all of the buses and what is where. After lunch we walked to her dorm to catch the 11 bus into London. We sat on the upper deck and worked our way to the front seats as people got off. That was a great vantage point for sight-seeing. We took the bus to Westminster Abbey and walked around there, the Parliament, 10 Downing St. and Buckinham Palace. Laura is a very good tour guide because she knows the history very well. You’ll ask about a statue or building and she knows who the person is, who’s nephew she is, yadda, yadda, yadda. At 4:15 it got dark so we walked, and took the tube to Charing Cross Station. The buses were very crowded due to a planned outage of the tube line for track repairs. We took a couple of buses past Picadilly and then to Laura’s neighborhood where we went to the ASK pizza restaurant for dinner. Susan and I were beat as we had only a few hours of sleep on the plane. After dinner we went to see Laura’s room and then home to bed!

View Sunday's Pictures

Back