London for a Day by Dave

We arrived by Eurostarin the evening and headed to our hotel, only to find that we didn’t actually have a booking! They had somewhere between us booking and them writing it down mislaid it, we did talk our way around, the guy that we spoke to said that he could give us a room, with breakfast supplied (we’d booked without brekky) but we had to pay cash in the morning. Not sure if he was pulling a dodgy on us, but we got our room, and breakfast, so we weren’t complaining too much.

We headed out for dinner, found a little pub not too far away, on Kings Road in Chelsea, nice beer, nice hamburgers, all good. There was a young Aussie guy working behind the bar there, of course, so we had a bit of a chat to him, he was planning on buying a pub there himself, seemed as though he had all the visas and stuff sorted out. He even had a back up plan of “marrying” a mate who had permanent residency over there, since gay marriages are legal in the UK, keen, but you wouldn’t want anyone back here finding out about it!!

The next day, our last day in the UK, was spent walking up and down Kings Road again, looking at stuff and trying to find some things that we had seen before we left before Chrissie. (Note from Alice: i wanted to shop but Dave had found a pair of diesels which he wanted, but of course didnt buy when he had the opportunity in Bristol. Subsequently, we spent the whole day racing around London trying to find them, to no avail. Hopefully this helped to teach Dave the important lesson of when you want something, just get it or else you will regret it and destroy your girlfriends last shopping day in London. So as Dave may say it was a nice relaxing day, it actually wasnt, and would hve been much nicer if i had been able to acually do some shopping!)Not much to report here either, nice relaxing day, before we headed out to Heathrow, to go through the usual stuff again.

We’d actually left a couple of bags that we didn’t want to cart around Europe at the hotel we stayed in before we flew out. Trouble is, there’s two hotels with this name there, so of course when we got a cab to pick up the bags, we went to the wrong one!! The cabbie wasn’t too happy, but eventually we got to the correct hotel, and got our bags, didn’t even charge us any extra for running around!! A quick re-pack at Heathrow and we were all good to check in. We managed to check-in, but for some reason our bookings weren’t linked, so were sitting a fair way apart. We asked if anything could be done, but they reckoned there was nothing, until the flight actually closed, we got in, and asked the Qantas club if we could actually change, and luckily they sorted it out for us just before we took off, bit of a pain, but we were getting used to little pains like that. Unfortunately, while we were packing, we didn’t really pay enough attention to the signs that said only 1 carry-on bag allowed, so another repack was required, and then we had to put a backpack through as check-in. Bit of a pain, but we did get ushered through security a bit quicker than usual, skipped some of the massive lines. We basically spent the rest of the time in the Qantas Club lounge, before getting some magazines to read before getting on the flight.