When I booked our tickets to Italy on a mid-summer day, I noticed the flight plan option that would give us a five-hour layover in London. We decided to go for it. In hindsight, I'm not sure we would have made the same decision.
We landed at Heathrow on very wet pavement, ominous gray clouds, and continuous pouring rain. Since we couldn't connect with an earlier flight to Rome, we bought roundtrip tickets on the Heathrow Express and made our way directly to Paddington. Without an umbrella or proper rain-proof jackets, we wandered the streets of this section of London until finally finding a little hole-in-the-wall cafe. We enjoyed the warmth and cover from the rain, while eating some delicious fish-n-chips. It was good. But, I have to say, not nearly as good as the little fish-n-chips place I've known since childhood, in Sausalito.
After lunch, we wandered some more, hoping around the next corner we'd finally find a street with awnings or some sidewalk covering of some sort. No such luck. We should have bought an umbrella at the train station. We went from wet and annoyed to more wet and more annoyed. Clearly not the best first impression of London. Even though we still had a couple of hours to waste, we decided to waste it back at the airport, where we could dry off and gather our happy spirits back together in time to arrive in Rome a few hours later.
London, I promise we'll give you a second chance, someday.
Well, at least we got an extra stamp in our passports.
1 comment:
That same thing happened to Derek and I last year when we went to Italy. We missed our flight coming back from our vacation so we had to pay an extra 200 dollars to get it switched. We decided we might as well have an overnight layover in Paris so we could see it. It was the worst thing we could have ever done! I was already upset about missing our flight, but then we totally got taken advantage of because we don't speak French. Even though our hotel was 2 minutes from the airport, our taxi driver took 25 minutes to get there because he kept driving around the airport (we knew what he was doing because we had been there earlier that day) so we ended up having to pay him a lot. That's not mentioning the 15 dollar coke we got either! But, Italy, that was amazing!
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