I’m finally getting around to posting about the trip I took to London and Edinburgh, Scotland a few weeks ago.  Paige, her mom, and I went to visit her dad who was teaching at Kings College in London as part of a British Studies program at USM. All of the pictures can be seen on my Flickr and Paige’s Flickr.
(Waiting in New Orleans)

We flew out of New Orleans on Friday (7/20), connected in DC,
(Paige asleep in Dulles)
and then on to Heathrow Airport in London.  We arrived at around 7am local time on Saturday.  After clearing immigration, we headed to customs.  The next thing we knew, we were out in the airport and headed to the tube (subway).  Apparently, there is even less to customs in England than in the US.  In Atlanta, they have a guy standing there taking your paperwork from you.  At Heathrow, you just walk though this big room–where I assume they are watching everyone via CCTV–and if they don’t stop you, you just go on through.  We were all a little surprised when we walked around the corner and found ourselves outside of the security section of the airport.  I wondered if we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and simply missed customs all together.

After navigating through the maze of un-airconditioned tunnels to the tube station, we made it on the train.  It was about an hour ride but we only had to change once and that was when we got close to central London.  After about 30 minutes, they start announcing that the line we were on was having “signaling difficulties” and that if you could get to your destination via another tube line, you should.  With the help of a very nice gentlemen who looked a little like Harrison Ford, we got off the train, made our way through a station and got onto another train headed in the right direction.  After another train change, we finally made it to Waterloo Station.
(Waterloo Station)

Our hotel for the first night was across the street from Waterloo so we walked over with all of our luggage to see if we could go ahead and check in.  When we get there we find that the hotel is managed out of the pub downstairs and (surprise, surprise) it is not open at 9am on Saturday.  While we are trying to figure out where we can go until they open, I walked around the corner and found a door unlocked.  After walking through another unlocked door, I found myself at the bar inside the pub.  I asked the girl cleaning up who could I talk to about checking in and she said, “How did you get in here?”  I showed her the door and she told me that all the rooms were booked up and that check-in wasn’t until noon.  This meant that we had 3 hours to kill with our luggage until we could get a room.  We had been up all night flying and didn’t want to drag all of our stuff around London right then so we just went back across the street to Waterloo Station and sat in Starbucks for 3 hours.
(Waiting in Starbucks)

By noon, we were all very tired.  We were able to check into the hotel and found out that our room was on the 3rd floor.  The building had no lift (elevator) so we had to navigate up some very small, steep stairs with all our luggage.  I was glad I had packed light but was wishing that I’d packed even lighter.  Once we got to our room, we all just crashed.

After an hour or so, Paige’s dad came up and greeted us.  We decided to sleep a little longer before we ventured out.  He went back to the dorm he was staying in down the street and we went back to sleep.  At around 4:30, we all woke up and met him again for dinner.  We went across the Waterloo bridge where we saw the sculptures that I’d read about somewhere.
(Statue on building)

That night we ate at the Spaghetti House for our first Italian meal of the trip.  It would not be our last.

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