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hazelchazTuesday, coming home.
Website Recovery Fund stands at $256 so far. Thanks to Darrel, Kim, and Matthew for the contributions and support.
Factoid of the day: I used about 330 business cards, and 550 pawprint stickers during the trip.
Up at 6:00 am. Breakfast, cab. I'm never going to call an unknown taxi service again; I'm going to write down the phone number for a real licensed taxi cab company. We'd taken the hotels' suggestions for calling a car at the beginning of the trip and at the end, and both times the experience left a bad taste in my mouth. This time he charged me 4 pounds extra because I had a lot of luggage. A real cab would have had enough room for my luggage, we've seen that before.
But anyhow, it's off to Paddington. We saw a C in a red-coloured circle on street signs all over London. It has something to do with "congestion charging" -- between 07:30 and 18:00 on certain streets, you're not allowed to drive unless you've paid a fee.
So we got to Paddington. Last time to use our Britrail passes, on Heathrow Express. We got to Heathrow, and found a lift to get our trolley full of luggage from the platform level up to the terminal.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
library_lynn wanted to go to the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk first, but we needed to go up to HM Customs to see about our VAT refund. And there were learned that, not only were we supposed to get a form from a merchant, we were supposed to get a form from every merchant where we purchased something we were going to bring home unconsumed. Arrgh. On the other hand, approximately half of what we spent on souvenirs was spent at the woollen shop where we did have a receipt and the right form. We turned it in to the man, and went back to check in.
After checking in, we learned that we were hours ahead of schedule; we had time to kill before they'd even announce a gate for our flight. We poked around at the market outside the security screening point, and followedcolleency's advice and spent all of our remaining cash on biscuits. We didn't have enough money to get a packet of crisps without having change left over. (We learned later that Virgin was collecting for a worthwhile charity and would happily have taken our last 40p from us.)
I'd walked out of the Belgrove with the key to Room 26, so I begged an envelope from Travelex and bought a packet of stamps and mailed their key back to them whilst I could. I now have five extra Royal Mail 1st Class stamps; I don't expect they'd do any good for mailing something overseas because they're non-denominated, and they're certainly not going to do any good here. (I was surprised that they come in packs of six; I would have expected five, or ten, or something like that. Possibly a holdover of the pre-decimal currency system?)
Lynn was dragging, I told her "tonight you'll be home in your own bed" to which she replied "Tonight and a half!" Our flight was due to leave at 12:00, and land about 15:00 -- eleven hours later. It was going to be a long day for us.
library_lynn and I made it through the screening, went to the Duty Free shops, and browsed. We went off in different directions to browse. I was hoping to get a last bit of fish and chips before leaving, but the place in the main terminal didn't open early enough and there wasn't anything that British in the food options available in the departure lounge. Oh well. I went to their whisky shop, and finally succumbed and bought some single malt. So I have some; I made it to Scotland and back, and I have a few samples of single malts. One of them's for missmea. They're miniatures, 5 cl each; I still couldn't justify spending 20 pounds or more on whisky when I knew I had a fine selection of single malts at home at Trader Joe's at better prices. But I did pick up some labels that weren't on the cheat sheet I'd brought with me.
I also bought some shortbread for Lynn; it turned out that she'd shopped there too, and bought some with the chocolate on top. I wanted us to have provisions for the trip, in case Virgin didn't feed us very much. (On the way out, on the red-eye, American Airlines fed us dinner, put us to bed, and fed us a continental breakfast in the morning.)
Virgin Atlantic feeds you. Oh, do they feed you. They kept coming by every hour with something else to offer us -- evenicecreams, at one point. (Actually they were strawberry frozen yogurt on a stick.) I wish we'd told the airlines ahead of time to have a fruit plate for Lynn; they'll do special dietary needs if you ask, we just need to get on the stick and ask the next time we're on a meal flight. (We won't get meals on the hop up to Seattle, I expect.)
The tv system is clever, too. The in-flight entertainment consists of a screen and headphones for each passenger, and they have fifty movies and many more tv episodes to choose from; and you can stop and start it as you like. I watched Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and most of Steamboy. I took advantage of the situation to watch the opening act of The Pacifier, which I'd missed when I saw it in the theatre.
They brought out cola and lemonade at one point; it was Virgin Cola, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, and Vmix Lemonade from Tick Hill. We tried the fizzy lemonade. Lynn said "It's a taste sensation" and I said "You can taste the lemon peel."
They gave us Penn State Pretzels, Worcester Sauce Flavor. They're from County Durham... must be some other Penn State than the one I'm used to.
Watching Bridget Jones I saw something that I would have thought was a continuity error, if I hadn't been in a UK summer for two weeks. There was a scene where it's a sunny day, she goes in to a building, comes out, it rains, she stops for something else, it's not raining... The rain's like that, though.
I finally watched my first complete episode of Doctor Who. It was the first episode of the new series, "Rose." Rose is an innocent earthling minding her own business, working at Henryks, a department store whose logo looks suspiciously like Harrods. The Doctor comes to town, and her life is changed forever... Okay, I enjoyed it, if more comes my way I'll check them out too.
We slept. We snacked. We found the WC, and read our books. We ate most of the choccies we'd brought with us.
Somewhere over Wyoming, someone on the PA asked if there was anyone on board who was medically qualified. Uh-oh...
We landed at Los Angeles, without event. Those of us on the left side were asked to stay seated to let the paramedics on board. Then after some of us got back up, we were reminded to please stay seated to let the paramedics and their charges off the plane too; and then, it's back to familiar land.
US Immigration. No big deal for us citizens. Saw the signs for the US-VISIT program -- they want both forefinger ink prints and a face shot too. Yeesh! We didn't have to go through that when we went abroad; why are we subjecting tourists to our land such?
There's a big room, the INS stations are on one side, the baggage carousels in the middle, and the US Customs & USDA stations on the other side. So you just work your way across the room.library_lynn and I waited at the oversize luggage conveyor belt for my folding handcart. The three aloha-print suitcases turned up on the far carousel about five or ten minutes after the cart turned up.
We had to go to the USDA line because we'd been on a farm while we were in England (remember the Cheshire Dairy Farm). The USDA inspection logo looks like the customs logo, only with a guy holding a green-colored leaf. Got our bags x-rayed, and we were on our way.
Then we had to get the car. The car was parked up atcolleency's house, so I took the Lot C shuttle, then the Santa Monica bus for 75 cents, and brought the car back to get Lynn and the luggage.
We stopped at Carl's Jr. (next to the LAX Hilton) and I got a chicken club sandwich. Lynn wasn't very hungry or we would have ordered fries for her. I took first shift driving; when the traffic started getting bad, we switched to Imperial Hwy., and eventually Lynn took over. We headed all the way down Imperial to Lucille's BBQ, in Brea, where we could get some barbecue. Yummy, yummy. And home, to bed. Bed, bed, bed.
Slept. Got up early. Went back to sleep. Got to work darned early. In fact, I've been getting to work fairly early still (even with a Thursday night with the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lasfs crowd at Coral); don't know how long it'll last, but so far so good... Anyhow, Wednesday, I had my bacon-egg-and-cheese quesadilla -- with actual crispy bacon, not the slices of ham pretending to be bacon -- and Wednesday afternoon I had three carne asada tacos. Back to the food I'm used to!
And now I'm working on the whole picture-uploading thing. Expect more updates as photos come online.
Website Recovery Fund stands at $256 so far. Thanks to Darrel, Kim, and Matthew for the contributions and support.
Factoid of the day: I used about 330 business cards, and 550 pawprint stickers during the trip.
Up at 6:00 am. Breakfast, cab. I'm never going to call an unknown taxi service again; I'm going to write down the phone number for a real licensed taxi cab company. We'd taken the hotels' suggestions for calling a car at the beginning of the trip and at the end, and both times the experience left a bad taste in my mouth. This time he charged me 4 pounds extra because I had a lot of luggage. A real cab would have had enough room for my luggage, we've seen that before.
But anyhow, it's off to Paddington. We saw a C in a red-coloured circle on street signs all over London. It has something to do with "congestion charging" -- between 07:30 and 18:00 on certain streets, you're not allowed to drive unless you've paid a fee.
So we got to Paddington. Last time to use our Britrail passes, on Heathrow Express. We got to Heathrow, and found a lift to get our trolley full of luggage from the platform level up to the terminal.
library_lynn wanted to go to the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk first, but we needed to go up to HM Customs to see about our VAT refund. And there were learned that, not only were we supposed to get a form from a merchant, we were supposed to get a form from every merchant where we purchased something we were going to bring home unconsumed. Arrgh. On the other hand, approximately half of what we spent on souvenirs was spent at the woollen shop where we did have a receipt and the right form. We turned it in to the man, and went back to check in.After checking in, we learned that we were hours ahead of schedule; we had time to kill before they'd even announce a gate for our flight. We poked around at the market outside the security screening point, and followed
colleency's advice and spent all of our remaining cash on biscuits. We didn't have enough money to get a packet of crisps without having change left over. (We learned later that Virgin was collecting for a worthwhile charity and would happily have taken our last 40p from us.)I'd walked out of the Belgrove with the key to Room 26, so I begged an envelope from Travelex and bought a packet of stamps and mailed their key back to them whilst I could. I now have five extra Royal Mail 1st Class stamps; I don't expect they'd do any good for mailing something overseas because they're non-denominated, and they're certainly not going to do any good here. (I was surprised that they come in packs of six; I would have expected five, or ten, or something like that. Possibly a holdover of the pre-decimal currency system?)
Lynn was dragging, I told her "tonight you'll be home in your own bed" to which she replied "Tonight and a half!" Our flight was due to leave at 12:00, and land about 15:00 -- eleven hours later. It was going to be a long day for us.
library_lynn and I made it through the screening, went to the Duty Free shops, and browsed. We went off in different directions to browse. I was hoping to get a last bit of fish and chips before leaving, but the place in the main terminal didn't open early enough and there wasn't anything that British in the food options available in the departure lounge. Oh well. I went to their whisky shop, and finally succumbed and bought some single malt. So I have some; I made it to Scotland and back, and I have a few samples of single malts. One of them's for missmea. They're miniatures, 5 cl each; I still couldn't justify spending 20 pounds or more on whisky when I knew I had a fine selection of single malts at home at Trader Joe's at better prices. But I did pick up some labels that weren't on the cheat sheet I'd brought with me.I also bought some shortbread for Lynn; it turned out that she'd shopped there too, and bought some with the chocolate on top. I wanted us to have provisions for the trip, in case Virgin didn't feed us very much. (On the way out, on the red-eye, American Airlines fed us dinner, put us to bed, and fed us a continental breakfast in the morning.)
Virgin Atlantic feeds you. Oh, do they feed you. They kept coming by every hour with something else to offer us -- evenicecreams, at one point. (Actually they were strawberry frozen yogurt on a stick.) I wish we'd told the airlines ahead of time to have a fruit plate for Lynn; they'll do special dietary needs if you ask, we just need to get on the stick and ask the next time we're on a meal flight. (We won't get meals on the hop up to Seattle, I expect.)
The tv system is clever, too. The in-flight entertainment consists of a screen and headphones for each passenger, and they have fifty movies and many more tv episodes to choose from; and you can stop and start it as you like. I watched Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and most of Steamboy. I took advantage of the situation to watch the opening act of The Pacifier, which I'd missed when I saw it in the theatre.
They brought out cola and lemonade at one point; it was Virgin Cola, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, and Vmix Lemonade from Tick Hill. We tried the fizzy lemonade. Lynn said "It's a taste sensation" and I said "You can taste the lemon peel."
They gave us Penn State Pretzels, Worcester Sauce Flavor. They're from County Durham... must be some other Penn State than the one I'm used to.
Watching Bridget Jones I saw something that I would have thought was a continuity error, if I hadn't been in a UK summer for two weeks. There was a scene where it's a sunny day, she goes in to a building, comes out, it rains, she stops for something else, it's not raining... The rain's like that, though.
I finally watched my first complete episode of Doctor Who. It was the first episode of the new series, "Rose." Rose is an innocent earthling minding her own business, working at Henryks, a department store whose logo looks suspiciously like Harrods. The Doctor comes to town, and her life is changed forever... Okay, I enjoyed it, if more comes my way I'll check them out too.
We slept. We snacked. We found the WC, and read our books. We ate most of the choccies we'd brought with us.
Somewhere over Wyoming, someone on the PA asked if there was anyone on board who was medically qualified. Uh-oh...
We landed at Los Angeles, without event. Those of us on the left side were asked to stay seated to let the paramedics on board. Then after some of us got back up, we were reminded to please stay seated to let the paramedics and their charges off the plane too; and then, it's back to familiar land.
US Immigration. No big deal for us citizens. Saw the signs for the US-VISIT program -- they want both forefinger ink prints and a face shot too. Yeesh! We didn't have to go through that when we went abroad; why are we subjecting tourists to our land such?
There's a big room, the INS stations are on one side, the baggage carousels in the middle, and the US Customs & USDA stations on the other side. So you just work your way across the room.
library_lynn and I waited at the oversize luggage conveyor belt for my folding handcart. The three aloha-print suitcases turned up on the far carousel about five or ten minutes after the cart turned up.We had to go to the USDA line because we'd been on a farm while we were in England (remember the Cheshire Dairy Farm). The USDA inspection logo looks like the customs logo, only with a guy holding a green-colored leaf. Got our bags x-rayed, and we were on our way.
Then we had to get the car. The car was parked up at
colleency's house, so I took the Lot C shuttle, then the Santa Monica bus for 75 cents, and brought the car back to get Lynn and the luggage.We stopped at Carl's Jr. (next to the LAX Hilton) and I got a chicken club sandwich. Lynn wasn't very hungry or we would have ordered fries for her. I took first shift driving; when the traffic started getting bad, we switched to Imperial Hwy., and eventually Lynn took over. We headed all the way down Imperial to Lucille's BBQ, in Brea, where we could get some barbecue. Yummy, yummy. And home, to bed. Bed, bed, bed.
Slept. Got up early. Went back to sleep. Got to work darned early. In fact, I've been getting to work fairly early still (even with a Thursday night with the
lasfs crowd at Coral); don't know how long it'll last, but so far so good... Anyhow, Wednesday, I had my bacon-egg-and-cheese quesadilla -- with actual crispy bacon, not the slices of ham pretending to be bacon -- and Wednesday afternoon I had three carne asada tacos. Back to the food I'm used to!And now I'm working on the whole picture-uploading thing. Expect more updates as photos come online.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-23 01:29 pm (UTC)Because if you enlarge the fingerprint to the same size as the face shot, and carefully lay them over each other in a special program (which nonetheless require manual input), the word "terrorist" will magically appear in red sans serif letters on the face of each terrorist.
At least, that's the only reason I can think of.
I'm new to your journal, so I didn't know about the server accident. I'm sorry to hear about it.
Stamps - in sixes!
Date: 2005-08-24 01:01 pm (UTC)They're sold in 6's & 10's
Allan
It _is_ bacon, not ham!
Date: 2005-08-24 01:09 pm (UTC)See, this is the thing about people not from Scotland... They seem to think that 'bacon' is the stuff that's full of fat - the bit that we cut off ::VBG::
My nieces & nephews in Switzerland love scottish bacon.
Oh, you can get it here... it's called 'streaky bacon', and it still has more meat on it than you're used to.
Allan