I took the regular direct flight on BA to London from Phoenix which I've taken many times. I arrived at the airport earlier than usual as it was an international flight. As I approached my gate, I noticed a lot of young people. As I got closer I noticed they were clean cut and dressed like missionaries. And sure enough, there was a group of nearly 30 LDS missionaries on my flight. This is always a good sign as it made me feel safe. I was able to speak to a few of them. They were all going to either Norway or some other country. As I boarded the plane I was happy to find that there were two free seats between me and the other person on my row of four. He was a missionary and we chatted for a while. I don't sleep well on planes so set up for a long flight. I watched a movie, at my dinner, and then felt a little tired. With the missionary having gone to sit with someone else in the plane, I now had the entire row to myself. So I laid down and tried to sleep. I tossed and turned for a while and used my eye cover I used on Lake Powell. How surprised I was that when I woke up, the lights were on. This meant we were nearly to London! I had slept most of the flight. It was awesome.
I had decided to try something new on this trip. My company's office is about an hour outside of London and it is expensive to get a taxi or even take the train (which takes even longer as you have to go to downtown London to catch the train). So I decided to rent a car. It would save the company a bunch of money and give me something new to try. I've never driven on the other side of the road. Even though we lived in Hong Kong, I never actually drove a car; just drove in cars. So I headed to rent the car and began my adventure to drive in England. Thankfully I got to my hotel safe with no issues.
My days at work the first few days were long. My jet lag wasn't too bad, though I did have difficulty sleeping one night. I knew I had a weekend with some free time so I tried to decide what to do. In the end I decided to spend Saturday in Bath. Bath is about 30 minutes away by train, so I decided to take the train instead of drive as it was pretty cheap. All I knew about Bath was that it was a site of an ancient Roman Bath. A few people had said going to Bath was a great choice. And upon arrival, I was so happy. It was a beautiful city. It reminded me a little of Paris. It definitely is a tourist town as there is tons of shops for shopping (not why I was there). But this meant some better food.
I walked around and enjoyed some of the sights and eventually ended up going to the Roman Bath. This is a museum on the site of the natural hot water spring that the Romans set up as a Bath back in about 40 AD. Though a little pricey, the museum was very cool. You are provided a "phone" where you can enter numbers to hear about certain parts of the tour that you want. It was amazing to see something so old. The original pools are still there - nearly 2000 years later. And it is still hot. I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would. It was good weather so I decided to walk around a bit more and stumbled upon a river tour. This tour was between two "weirs", which I didn't know what those were before my tour. Basically they are like mini dams to raise the level of the river a few feet. This was pretty cool as we went along the slow river watching life go on along the banks. We saw rugby games, people doing archery, gorgeous homes and even a couple of boys who had just caught a huge pike (it was nearly 2 feet long).
Afterwards I had a quick dinner (at Nando's - one of my fav chicken places) and took the train back. Then I spent most of the evening binge watching Arrow. This was a cool trick I figured out. Netflix is blocked in the UK. Arrow season 2 had just been released and I had watched a few before traveling. While here I had an epiphany: I use a VPN when working when I need to access certain things. The VPN would show a US ip address. I wouldn't want to use it on the weekdays as people are using it and it might slow down speeds, etc. But on the weekends hardly anybody is working, so I was able to stream Arrow. (Loving it BTW).
Sunday I got up and got ready to attend church. I was lucky my boss (also Mormon) warned me that they aren't currently meeting in the local chapel as it is being expanded. So they are meeting in a school. The LDS website does not mention this, so it was lucky for him to tell me (he had just been here a few weeks ago and actually used to live here). I made it in time for sacrament meeting. It was ward conference. The speakers (audio system) weren't working, so it was a little hard to hear. But there were a lot of people. And the speakers were excellent. The bishop and the entire Stake Presidency spoke. They all spoke about "being alone". I was touched most by the bishop's talk and the Stake President's. Tears...
I then took a quick drive down the road to Avebury, which is a site with stones similar to Stonehenge (I considered going to Stonehenge, but felt like the hour drive wouldn't be worth it). Though this site is one of the largest stone circles and quite old, I only stayed like 30 minutes and went back to the hotel as it was just a bunch of stones. Cool to see for a few minutes, but beyond that not much else to do.
The rest of the week was just spent waiting to go home. I wasn't thrilled about being in the UK and just wanted to be home. The days were busy and went fast. Going home was going to be fun in hte fact that I decided to pick the cheaper option of flying into LA (as opposed to the direct route to Phoenix) so I could fly on an A380, the world's largest plane (for people). It was pretty cool. Besides being so big and having two decks the entire plane, I was impressed with the quietness of the plane and it seemed a little more roomy than usual planes. The entertainment screen was also quite large. It was packed, so no luck sleeping on the way back - and I then had to wait for the flight back to PHX from LA (which, BTW, I hate the LA airport), but I was happy to take it.
I got home safe and sound having learned to drive on the wrong side of the road. I took Friday off to recuperate, which worked out great as I was able to recover quickly.
1 comment:
Cool experience.
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