London

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!

                               That would be correct Dorothy, and as someone once stated, “All good things must come to an end.” So here we find ourselves at the end of our River Cruise, and we are in Amsterdam waiting for our Flight to……

                                                London!

                                                Not Newark! We’re not comin’ home yet!

                                                We’re not done yet!

                                                Not by a longshot!

So, if you thought that you were going home today, just forget about it! You’d best go and rinse out a few items because from here on there’s no Laundry Service aboard as we will be in a stationary, always in the same place we left it, take an elevator up, hotel.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

We boarded our flight from Amsterdam to London/Heathrow  with little fanfare. All normal.

           Until we reached London.

           There we found out that one of our suitcases (the BIG one) was going on its own adventure to Places Unknown. British Airways was pretty good about helping us with the Lost Luggage process (more on that later). We are in the President Hotel, which is nice enough, but it has no air-conditioning, which in London, usually is not an issue. Unfortunately, the Hot Weather from Europe followed us over there and made it just a little warmer than normal, but bearable when you are used to Texas weather!

           We had decided not to go crazy whilst in London, a few items a day would suffice nicely. We could have easily taken the Underground from Heathrow into the city and would have, had we not had heavy luggage!

           But wait! We didn’t have heavy luggage because that Big One was AWOL somewhere… but it was too late to cancel our nice black Mercedes Limo that was picking us up, as the driver was already waiting for us! Oh well.

           We spent the rest of the afternoon resting as it was almost time to search for somewhere to have dinner. Oh, and British Air did find our errant luggage! Apparently, it got chummy with a bunch of fly-by-night duffel bags and thought it wanted to go ‘elsewhere’. It was rounded up before it had a chance to permanently vamoose. It arrived the next day, late in the afternoon but not before we went ahead (with British Airway’s blessing) and purchased a few ‘essentials’. We ended up going to the shops on Tottenham Court Road (what a cool name!) in Central London to pick up these up. First it was an Outdoors Store for some shorts and a shirt, then down the street to really large clothing store to get some new unmentionables. This is the store that Paula could have spent the day in as the offerings and the prices were quite good.  Back to the room to exit yesterday’s clothes and don todays nifty new outfits….. shorts and some new shirts!

           +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++                     

Ok, it’s time for me to come clean.

I can’t continue to pretend to be in the Past. We are home now, but I’m afraid that the days got away from me and trying to Post every day without the aid of a few Sea Days, well, it is impossible to keep up… but I did try!

I’m trying to determine how I’m going to handle the next few days in London, and I think that I’ll just figure it out along the way. You may get some combined days if that makes sense, you will be the first to know! We didn’t jam-pack anything, so each day was at a comfortable pace. Mostly all of the essential sights/sites were sighted, some good pics were taken, and the weather was always nice, albeit a tad hot. Since ‘today’ is almost over and all we need to do is find dinner, tomorrow will be the Tower of London and that Shopping that you’ve already heard about!

So, Cheerio! for now as my phone is ringing. It looks like the Captain of our plane wants to know if I can help him find a new place of employment.                                                                         

I do know of an outfit that flies out of Hong Kong…..