Meg Notes: Lost in London

Monday, June 28, 2010

Lost in London

This will be a long post. Just thought I'd warn you.

I flew out of Salt Lake on Friday, with stops in Chicago O'Hare and Newark. I was traveling with another BYU student, Jared Holloway. The layovers weren't supposed to be long at all (about one hour max for each--just enough time to get to the next gate and take a short rest), but something happened to our plane in Newark, and so we had an unexpected delay of 3 hours to deal with plane maintenance. The layover augumented the correlation I make between the Newark Airport and layovers. The last time I was there, we had a layover for 7 hours. Not fun. But Jared and I decided that we need to think of something to do for the 6-hour layover we'll have in Houston on the way back. I wholeheartedly agree.

We were supposed to fly out of Newark around 8 pm, but we didn't end up leaving until about 11:30 pm. So, we got into London-Heathrow about 11:00 am. I really enjoyed looking out of the window at the English countryside below. Beautiful.

We went through Customs quite easily in Heathrow, but when we went to get baggage, Jared's suitcase wasn't there. We're all hoping that he'll be able to get it really soon. I had my first experience on the tube (the London Underground), so that was exciting. Jared got the directions to the Youth Hostel, but the Jubilee Line that we needed to take to get to the Canada Water station was down for the weekend.

We were lost (I was REALLY lost . . . Jared at least could figure out directions a lot better than I could), but we did eventually (after a lot of walking, sweating, taking a lot of buses, and calling the Youth Hostel for directions when we were lost again), we finally made it to the Youth Hostel. Hurray!

A picture that I took on the bus of the Tower of London

A residential area of London (in which the Youth Hostel was located, and which we got to know quite well from walking about so much. :)

Me, after almost 17 hours of flying, tube-riding, bus-riding, and walking. Anywho, the rest of the day was quite nice after getting to the hostel. We walked along the Thames, which was nice. I also got to see Platform 9 and 3/4, which was awesome. I was so excited that I got to do that. I'm Harry Potter geek, so it made me all happy inside. :) We also saw Hyde's Park (which is a lot bigger than I expected), and watched the ending of the USA-Ghana game in a pub.

Well, I need to get ready for my first Cambridge class. (!) I'll post more about getting to Cambridge and Cambridge itself later. By the way, it's absolutely beautiful here.