Sanger Cruiser Travel Log: June 13, 2016 - Good-bye California Hello London

After hearing about how it is taking longer to go through security, we made sure that we got to the airport early. We actually made it from our hotel, checking in, going through security and to our gate in only 45 minutes.

Which then gave us plenty of time to relax and eat our Subway sandwich that we had picked up before we left our hotel. Cheryl and I made a few trips around the the terminal to try to get our steps in.

I think we were the last group to board the plane. The nice thing is that they loaded the plane back to front both on the top deck and bottom. Of course first class and all the elites could board first. With the 100's of people that they boarded the plane it went pretty quickly.

I don't think we look to bad for not having slept in 20 hours. Although one of us at least go to lay down for a little while.

With directions in hand we headed for the Underground once we passed through customs and picked up our luggage. Our first adventure began when we had to buy our tickets. I had wanted to buy an Oyster card so that we could just put some money on it and be done with it for the week plus it is cheaper per ride to have it. We could not figure out how to buy that from the kiosk so after a couple of tries just to buy a regular ticket I finally figured out what I needed to do. Of course if we would have waited until we got to the gate of the underground we could have purchased the Oyster Card from a live person. Oh well we had our ticket and we had no issues with traveling to the Westminster metro stop, switching lines at Hammersmith. The second and much longer adventure came once we crossed the bridge on our way to our apartment for the week. Not quite sure which way we should take at the roundabout we asked a local #1 who sent us in one direction and when we asked local #2 (who looked it up on his phone) sent us back the way we had come. We found the park that we were told to walk though and on the other side of it we asked local #3 which way we should go and again he looked it up on his "smart phone" and we followed his directions until we came to Local #4, who was a mailman, and he sent us off in another direction. Finally we came to the other side of the park we had walked through and there was Local #5 (an ambulance driver) who again looked it up on his "smart" phone so we had to go back the way we had come passing local #3 who was very puzzled why we were coming back that way so he had to pull out his phone to show me that he had sent me in the "right" direction. Of course I then had to hurry to catch up to the rest of the group. The ambulance drivers phone was really the "smart" phone and after getting over 8,000 steps in we finally were at the apartment. Luckily though we made it under cover before it started pouring down rain.