After a summer hiatus from travel, we have begun our triumphant return with a trip we were meant to have done last November, but with some modifications. Nicole was able to secure us some permits to trek and see gorillas in Uganda. These are in very limited supply and not easy to come by. First things first, however, we had to get on a plane heading in that general direction.
Our gorilla trek wasn’t for a week after my vacation started, so we decided to make a few stopovers enroute. First stop: London. We entertained other locations including Paris or Amsterdam, but the flight loads didn’t look as good. Frankly, London wasn’t fantastic looking either. LAX-LHR is a flight route we have done probably four or five times now and we have never been awarded a decent seat. Nevertheless, we listed for business and hoped for the best.
We didn’t have to be at LAX until after 3 in the afternoon and made a stop at the United Club since my passes expire in less than a month. It was fairly busy, but we went to the outdoor section, where another passenger was flying with an Emmy, which I assume counts as a personal item. We moseyed on over to gate 74 to hear our fate, which resulted in a mystery of 3 Polaris business seats magically appearing out of the blue. This was quite a coup for us, as it is so hard to get a business class seat going to Europe out of LAX. We settled in for the long flight.
Both of us struggled to get any meaningful sleep. There is always one guarantee on long haul flights. There is a small child who will wail and screech whilst a man of advanced age will cough and sneeze at an unacceptable volume. Later on, the flight attendants were chatting to each other as if everyone was deaf. We arrived at Heathrow’s Terminal Two groggy and confused. Customs seemed to go smoother than usual. We were out in a matter of minutes. We followed an unclear path to get to the offsite rental car pickup site for Hertz. We waited for about twenty minutes until we were called up to a desk. The cheapest option was an all-electric Jeep Avenger. It is like a small SUV or crossover. We couldn’t check-in until 3, so we passed the time by going to Richmond.
Richmond is the setting and filming location of the show, Ted Lasso. Above is the pub from the series. We walked around the neighborhood for a bit seeing Ted’s flat, the village green, and numerous other quaint streets before hopping back in the car and looking for a Waitrose grocery store to get some food.
The place we are staying at — the Whitmoor Farm, is a self-catering establishment meaning they don’t do continental breakfast or anything like that, but we do have a kitchen and laundry facilities should we require them. We picked up some meat pies, breakfast pastries, and snacks and headed out.
Once checking in, we made ourselves some tea for an afternoon pick-me-up. I dipped some Hobnobs in them. Hobnobs are a classic English “biscuit” for tea. The tea melts the chocolate a bit and makes the otherwise dry biscuit more than palatable — a phrase that is about as good as an endorsement you can get for English cuisine. We had our tea outside by a swimming pool. It is unusually nice weather for England. The sun was out most of the day and it was a comfortable temperature around 70 degrees.
Not sure what we will do tomorrow. We have all day to relax as our flight to Kenya doesn’t depart until the following day. Since we have the car, it opens up other possibilities, but our ambitions will depend on the quality of our sleep tonight. On that note, that is all for today. Adieu.
passports & pepto bismol 