Day -03 & -02 - Thu/Fri - Home to London
After a very brief less than 72 hours at home following our last trip out of England, we found ourselves back at SeaTac airport for a direct flight to London on Delta. Our flight was scheduled for 5:40pm and we arrived at the airport around 3:15pm. The ticketing agent didn't put our TSA PreCheck on our tickets so we had to return to the ticketing counter to get that fixed. But I didn't notice another problem until we reached the gate: we were assigned seats on opposite sides of the airplane. Fortunately a gate agent was able to fix it and we had seats 47a&b (near the back of the airplane in economy).
The A330-200 took off close to on time and we had a little bit longer takeoff roll (yes, I always count the number of seconds for takeoff). Typically it's 31 or 32 seconds; today's was 39 seconds. The flight was smooth and we were served beverages first (tip: order two as it's a long time until the next one) so we ordered sparkling water and a Coke Zero each. One could order any drink including wine, beer, or spirits. All drinks are complementary. The dinner was a curry chicken and rice which was quite good. For this flight I watched The Greatest Showman (I really like the power ballads in it) and the first part of Mama Mia. But for most of the flight I listened to classical music and dozed for most of the flight. In this aircraft, I really liked the 2-4-2 abreast seating. It makes it easy for everyone to reach an aisle. The flight was virtually full.
I will add that Angela purchased some stuffable neck pillows ($10 each on Amazon), and they were much better than the typical foam rubber pillows we typically use on long flights. I stuffed mine with a fleece and Tshirts and it kept my neck from flopping to the side. I highly recommend them.
An hour and a half before landing we were served a snack consisting of a boxed cheese calzone made in Turkey and some Greek yogurt. The calzone was a bit dry and too much bread, but the yogurt was terrific. The landing approach was a bit rocky passing through rain clouds, but the touchdown was icy smooth. We parked at a holding point away from the terminal and were bused to terminal 3 where we did the long walk to border control. It was pretty cool to have the Captain at the bottom of the airplane stairs thanking everyone for their patronage. I quickly did the facial recognition, but Angela struggled a bit with hers. Afterwards, we collected our waiting small rolling suitcases (one each) and met our guide, Allison, just outside baggage claim. She's a recently retired foreign language teacher like Angela, quite bubbly, and they hit it off very well.
It was then a 2 hour wait for everyone on our group to arrive. That gave us a chance to meet a few of the people in our group of 37. There are over 300 in the entire group, but we won't see them until Saturday's dinner at the hotel. I got to meet a fellow who was traveling alone as his wife has Alzheimer's. Finally, we were escorted to our motor coach for a city tour and we learned we wouldn't be at the hotel until 5pm! Keep in mind that we arrived at 10:20am after an all night flight.
Assad, our driver, skillfully drove us through heavy London traffic and we made two stops: first at Buckingham Palace and then a longer one at Westminster Abbey. At the second stop we ate a quick snack before reboarding the bus. We did get to see Paddington Bear at the Peruvian embassy which was rather cute. We observed antique cars (many from pre-WWI) being unloaded from covered transport trailers and many large farm tractors being used in a protest against new law about estate taxes on farmers.
We reached the hotel promptly at 5pm, collected our luggage, met Alan (the travel Agent who organized this trip - go to https://TravelWithAlan.com to sign up for his newsletter which comes out weekly and primarily has fantastic deals on cruises. We've done around 10 of them and they are all inclusive), and picked up our room key and meal vouchers and bus shuttle tickets for the remainder of the trip. We're at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel and it's quite nice. We found our room 606 where we deposited our luggage before meeting up with Gary & JoAnne with whom we have previously done other Travel With Alan cruises. Our first one with them was in 2012 from FLL to San Diego on the Celebrity Century. Our most recent one was two years ago on the Majestic Princess from Sydney to Seattle. We've known them for nearly 20 years after meeting them in a motorcycle club.
We ended up eating dinner with them in the hotel bar Humphrey's and catching up. They were on a later flight so they are doing a city tour on Saturday morning while we have the full day free. We'll meet again at the group dinner on Saturday night. For Saturday, we're planning to attend a West End theatre matinee at 3pm. West End is London's equivalent of Broadway. When we were here 3 years ago, we went to 4 nights of Broadway musicals. When we were in England last September, we didn't spend any time in London but went to Southampton directly from the airport.
We were in bed by 10:30pm and tomorrow will be a long day. But it's good to be back in London and really good to have a good lay of the land. On Sunday, we'll be bussed to Southampton for the start of our month long cruise ending at Port Canaveral, Florida. It's about a 2.5 hour bus ride to Southampton.
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