Landing in London

Happy Friday! Way to make it through another work week…
When we started talking about where to go on Trey’s graduation trip, topping his list of places in Europe was London. He had wanted to go there for years, and had even occasionally pulled out a fairly on point British accent. Since Mike and I are not huge city people, we decided to start the trip with London and end with Ireland which we were guessing would be more relaxing.

On May 24 2019, Trey’s actual last day of high school, with our bags packed (3 backpacks and a very small purse), we had Grandma’s Uber take us to the Bismarck airport. We had a 4ish hour layover in Minneapolis, and then boarded our first ever international flight early evening. Around 7am on May 25th we landed at London Heathrow, a bit tired as sleep was elusive on the plane, in desperate need of good coffee and smelling like an airplane (you know the smell, sort of stale, sort of sweaty – it’s a good combination, they should probably bottle the scent).

After getting off the plane (hallelujah), we followed the arrivals signs to Passport Control/Border Control. The lines (queues) are long leading to passport control, but they move quickly, and passport control is automated (you stand where the feet marks are and scan your passport, then the magic gates open), unless the picture on your passport looks WAY different than you (like mine), then the automated machine thingy makes you talk to a real live person.

After we made it through passport control, we followed more signs to where we would have picked up our checked luggage (if we’d had any), finally found a bathroom (US airport bathrooms should up their game), found an ATM to get pounds from and then followed the signs for the underground. Before we could board the underground we needed to purchase an Oyster Card which we would use to ride public transit through out London. The Oyster card is a small card, similar to a debit card that you load with money and use to pay for public transit around London. It’s simple to use, just needing to be tapped against the entry and exit points when you are entering and exiting stations, and is simple to ’top up’ when your balance gets low. You can also turn in your visitor Oyster card at the end of your stay in London and get any unused pounds returned to you. The process of getting the Oyster card at the terminal seemed a bit confusing, but likely was due to 1. no coffee and 2. no sleep. We also could have ordered it ahead of time to be delivered to our house and then would not have needed to stand in any queues prior to getting on the transit of our choice.

The best thing about using the underground? Your map app tells you exactly which lines you need to be on. The worst thing about arriving on a weekend? The line we needed to get us from Heathrow to central London was closed for repairs. Which meant we needed to either take the Heathrow Express which would have only taken about 15 mins but cost us over £300, or take the TfL rail which would take about an hour but cost much less. We took the longer (hour) ride at a much lower price and enjoyed our first glimpses of London.

We chose to stay in the Canary Wharf district of London which is east of Central London, mainly due to reviews of the area (see previous post about hours and hours of research), and finding a hotel that didn’t break the bank but had 2 beds and met my hotel review standards (yes, I am a bit of a hotel snob). I had looked at a budget friendly hotel near the Tower Bridge, but was not able to find a great room option for 3 people and really didn’t want to book 2 rooms. We also were arriving on a holiday weekend which made hotels a bit harder to find.

The Canary Wharf tube station was only a short walk from our Hotel, so we strapped our backpacks on and took our first of many walks through London. At first with me leading with the help of maps. As would be evident throughout the trip, I should never be in charge of leading if we are using the walk feature in maps. I can’t be trusted with it… moving on. From the time we landed at Heathrow until we made it to our hotel room was about 3.5 hours. If I hadn’t tried to navigate us from the tube station to our hotel it may have shaved off 25 mins…kidding! But for sure 5. By the time we made it to our hotel, we had been up for well over 24 hours. Trey and I had slept some on the plane, but Mike had not. We decided to shower so we would feel human (and be less stinky), and set off in search of our first London meal.