A Long Day Of Travel

Last night (Sunday night) we drove from Naragansette back up to Boston so we could catch our 9am flights. I had booked a hotel in a Boston suburb that was only 2.6 miles from the airport…it took a while, but we finally found our hotel. It was smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood! I have to wonder, are things just different on the East Coast or is it that we just don’t pay that much attention to things when we’re at home!?

After crawling into bed shortly after 2am we started our Monday at 6am with a wake up call and 2 alarms going off. We were out of our hotel by 6:30 and on our way to return our rental car. We were even able to squeeze in 2 minutes to drive by the beach just in time to see the sun rising over the water. It actually looked a lot like the sun set on the West Coast. Who knew?!

We dropped off the rental car (goodbye Charger, we will miss you!) and hopped on the shuttle back to the terminals…we parted ways with Chet and were really, finally, on our way to Europe!

Ahh, how do you describe this 6 hour and 45 minute interational flight? Let’s see…2 screaming children in our row, no leg room, seats too small for me to rest my head against, crappy omlet, i mean a really crappy omlet…wait, wait…getting pesimistic. The flight was GREAT! The flight attendants were nice, the flight was smooth (whew!) and everything was on time! During the final pass through the plane the flight attendant looked at us and said “are you two on your honeymoon??” (I have no idea why…maybe vacation makes us look like we’re in loooooooooove!). We told her that we weren’t honeymooners, but that we were FINALLY taking the vacation we’ve been talking about for 11 years now! We talked a little about the trip with her and she was just so sweet and excited that she insisted on buying us a drink! She looked at the other flight attendant and asked for 2 champagne glasses, he asked her “what are they celebrating?” to which she replied, “they’re celebrating LIFE!”. What a statement! She was exactly right, and I couldn’t have put it better myself!

We arrived in London, made our way through customs, then onto the Tube and all the way into central London and our hotel on The Strand (right in the middle of it all!).

Exhausted and starving we dropped our bags off in our room and walked to see what food we could find at nearly midnight on a Monday night. Luckily we stumbled on a great little restaurant called Maxwell’s that was having MONDAY MADNESS! Half off most of the menu! And it was delicious! (All we’ve heard is how bad the food would be in London and Ireland…so we were pleasantly surprised). We were also thrilled to see that there was ice in our water! Our waiter was from France and was very friendly. He chatted with us for quite a while after our dinner. He had spent the previous year living in Florida and told us that he liked how friendly “the Americans” are. He also warned us that it would not be that way in Paris! Ha.

And now here we are, back in the room, exhausted and ready for bed. There is a charge for internet in this room so we’ll be updating a few blogs at a time…but not tonight! Sweet dreams!