Chapter 9
London and Paris
By: Angie
March 22, 2002
Nervous...that is how I felt when our Aunt Jeanie dropped us off at the airport. I haven't flown in awhile and after 9/11 I thought I never would again. I've been looking forward to the trip but there has been this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I won't make it back home. I know it's silly and this is the trip of a lifetime but it's really hard to not worry. Kim and I fumble at the counter with our passport and all by trying to answer the questions the lady asks us while putting name tags on our luggage. Once done we were on our way. One problem, we have to wait.....we do a lot of this. We go to the food area and get a sundae before heading to our gate. (You are going to find in reading this that we are ice cream fanatics! LOL) Security was pretty easy and didn't take as long as we thought it would. It wouldn't be long now and we would be on our way.
The first plane we went on that took us to Miami was one of those tiny ones that you have to go out on the tarmac and actually climb up these little stairs to get into it from the back of the plane. I will never get on one of those again. More on that later though. We had about a three hour layover when we got to Miami. Finally, we boarded a 777 on American Airlines and headed for London to meet Mom. She would be traveling on British Airways from Bahrain. The plane was really nice and they fed us well. We watched television..Spin City and was able to watch the location of the plane as well as the altitude as we traveled. This was important to me since I would check it out each time we hit turbulence. I felt more secure knowing that we hadn't dropped in altitude! Kim and I had a hard time sleeping on the plane. It was exhausting. We maybe slept an hour and woke to the sun coming up. They fed us breakfast and we soon landed.
The planes from all of the different countries were the first things we saw when we landed. We hadn't seen anything like that before. It was really cool. We couldn't wait to get out of the plane and see mom. We hadn't seen her since the summer. The first thing we did was head the the restroom....they call them toilets there. Kim commented on how blunt they were about that. I thought it was funny. After that we had a little confusion as to where we show our passport and where we pick up our luggage. We eventually figured it out and headed to the "way out" which is what they call an exit. We learned quickly! Mom was waiting anxiously for us. Kim, who is much more of a people watcher than I am spotted her quickly. I was so happy to see her!
We quickly left the airport and a nice Englishman told us where to find the black cabs to take us to our hotel. I was amazed at how these looked. You'll see a picture of one on the picture page. Kim found it funny that there was a no smoking sign in the cab but the driver was up front smoking away. There was a glass partition between us so we weren't bothered by it but it was kind of funny.
The hotel let us check in early and we were pretty happy with the room except they never seemed to have enough towels for us. They always brought two when there were three of us. Mom had told us that they don't have wash clothes in the hotels in Europe so we had all brought our own. I'm glad one of us was a seasoned traveler. :o) Anyway, we were so exhausted that Kim and I crashed. We had lost five hours while Mom had gained three so she wasn't as tired. I think she was able to sleep on the plane over.
When we got back up we headed out to find something to eat. We were amazed to find that the Underground station, The Tube was just across the street from the hotel. We ate at McDonald's which was rather amusing to me being it was our first meal there and then we went to find out information on how to travel on the Tube. We were told that getting a week pass would be best but we had to get passport size pictures taken. The man said that we could use the picture machine there and we could do two people for one price by one jumping out of the booth midway through. We found out that this was not correct since it took only one picture and gave us four copies of it. The pictures I taped in my journal above were the ones we ended up taking. It was a smart move to get these passes though. Afterwards we went to a little pub in the station and had a drink. Our first night in London! It still didn't feel we were so far away from home.