Europe Trip

     It wasn’t the fare watcher that I live with who discovered the great price on a round trip to London, direct from Denver.  It was a former colleague.

     Before Joe got into the teaching and farming business, he worked for TWA.  He knows the ropes.  Joe also has ties to folks in Germany.  He likes to visit them every few years. 

      One day he called and suggested we all go first to London, then on to Frankfurt, Germany.  The price was right.  There was one hang-up.  When he added the flight to Germany, the fare doubled.  Joe knew his way around that.  By scheduling a separate flight, he got the cheap rate to London and a fairly good rate to Frankfurt.  How could we say no?

     Besides, what does one do in mid-February except wish for spring to arrive?  It all seemed so far off when the planning and booking took place.  February 15 really did come, hard on the heels of a day, February 14, of doing singing Valentines for the barbershop chorus.

     We left Denver about 5 p.m. and arrived in London the next day at 9 a.m.  We bought “tube” tickets that would serve us for the five days we were there.  We commenced learning the subway system.  In due time we arrived at Paddington Station.  Joe booked a hotel two blocks from Paddington.  It was the St. David Hotel.  It became our home base, Paddington Station, our springboard to adventure.

     We had been to the British Museum before, but I wanted to see again the Rosetta stone and all the Egyptian stuff the Brits “transferred” to England.  The first time I saw that, I felt they had done an injustice by removing so many artifacts from the country of origin.  This time, I felt thankful that so many things would be preserved, out of the hands of the IS “delinquents” who have destroyed so many antiquities in the Mid-East.

    We aren’t as young as we used to be.  After five hours of looking at stuff, we were done for the day.  Another three or four days would be necessary to do justice to all the things in the British Museum.

     Our second day found us at the tower of London.  We viewed the Crown Jewels.  They were presented entirely differently than they had been in 1990.  We passed on the Beefeater tour, so we missed a lot of things, like the dungeons and torture chambers and the chapel with its headless bodies beneath the basement floor. 

      Instead, we spent a couple of hours viewing famous paintings in a gallery nearby (can’t remember which one).  Not being a great appreciator of art, nevertheless, I felt the magnitude of greatness I was among by estimating the insurance value of each room we visited in the gallery.  Not for nothing have I watched Antiques Roadshow.

     Day three found us taking in the tower of Big Ben, which is closed for a year of renovations, but we still looked at its exterior.

     We also looked at Westminster Abbey.  It was Sunday and church service was in progress.  You can’t take a tour of the place on Sunday.  Visitors are welcome to attend the church service, but you have to wait for one service to end and another to begin.

     We looked at the Parliament building, too.  When the most recent idiot ran his car into pedestrians on the bridge near parliament and knifed a policeman, we all could say, “Hey we walked on that bridge.”  One of the things we noticed as we walked around the parliament building were the cement barricades separating street from walkway.  At the time I conjectured that they were intended to prevent a truck from crashing through the gates of parliament.

      When the London car-murderer hit the news, I thought, there is no 100% way to protect against attacks by idiots.  Even if we could develop a foolproof idiot-detector, I am afraid most of us would get caught in its jaws at some time or another.  It would be like in “Mayberry RFD” when Barney, left in charge by Andy’s leaving town, has the entire town’s population locked up in jail for various violations.

      As we were all very tired, we retired to the hotel for a nap.  We took care of a few details, such as taking our clothes to a laundry, scheduling a cab to pick us up Tuesday morning at 5 am to take us to the airport.  We visited Paddington main station, different from the tube station.  There we had an informal tea and did a bit of shopping for stuff like bottled water and ibuprofen to help relieve the cold I was starting to develop, or redevelop.

      Monday was the last day in London.  We visited the War Museum, mostly WWI stuff, though there was a small collection of WWII things.  We had enough of people killing people, so we took in the Tate Gallery.  Again, lots of famous paintings, not one of which I can remember, sorry to say.

    Tuesday 4 am wakeup call found me feeling really lousy with cold symptoms, but the show must go on.  Our cab driver was from Iraq, so we talked international politics at 5 am, all the way to Heathrow, where we had to clear security. 

     I could write a fair-sized article on going through airport security, starting with DIA where the TSA guy had me hitch up my jeans Herkel-fashion while he checked my pant legs all the way up to the point he determined I had nothing foreign in my jockey shorts.  Something about me arouses suspicion in the security people. 

     Some of our party of four got a pat down in the four encounters we had with airport security, but I got singled out and patted down every time.  Could it be my cocked eye?

      The first hurdle we had to clear at Heathrow security involved liquids.  All our liquids and gels had to fit into one Ziploc bag.  It took quite some doing for the Goodwife to get all her liquids and gels in one bag.  I took a couple of her things.  A kindly bloke working the assembly line in front of the metal detector machine helped me get my Ziploc bag closed around the bottles and tubes.  Perhaps he could see I was in pretty poor shape with my head cold.

     While this was all taking place, we got separated.  We couldn’t find Katie.  We looked all over before we went through the final security check.  Finally, we determined to look for her on the “other side”, and if we didn’t find her, we would have to summon professional help. 

      After my scanning, wanding, and pat down, I had to visit with another lady who wanted to take a look at my CPAP machine.  All was well there, and when we finally crossed the final bridge to the concourses, there stood Katie patiently waiting.  She had been hustled quickly through all the security checks while we were still struggling with liquids and gels and Ziploc bags.

    Finally, we had plenty of time to sit down to breakfast before catching our 7 a.m. to Frankfurt.  It was the first breakfast we paid for, every other breakfast being provided by the hotel.  (Two eggs, “bacon” we would call ham, two boiled tomatoes, a scoop of baked beans, plenty of toast, and coffee or tea.  We easily lived on two meals a day while in London, starting with the robust breakfast.)   

      Off to Frankfurt.