First day in London….
The great European Vacation began Sunday evening as we bordered a plane to London. I have traveled to Europe a number of times and I continue to hate the experience of getting here. Nine plus hours crammed into a small space. I don’t know how people manage to sleep, I doubt I got more than an hour total. I will say the food provided on this British Air flight was pretty good though. My new Bose noise canceling headphones I got for Christmas were also amazing. Well worth the $300 they cost. I had them on for nearly eight hours straight and the battery was only down to 90% when we landed.
Upon arriving we did the long walk from the Termianl to customs, I swear it had to be close to a mile. We got through customs fairly quickly and managed to find out way to the trains. I had pre-purchased tickets on the express train to London and the train was sitting there waiting for us when we walked up.
I knew we’d have to get new SIM’s for our phones/iPad, since none of us wanted to go without connectivity while out site seeing. I had planned at getting the pre-paid SIM at the train station downtown, but Rosie started getting itchy for connectivity before we had even made it to the train, so we had to stop at one of the vending machines and buy three SIMs at the airport.
The cost wasn’t a huge difference from what I had read you could get downtown, so that wasn’t a big deal. They also had SIMs by EE, which I had read had the best LTE coverage. The only problem, I forgot to pack the SIM extraction tool (i.e. Paperclip) and of course no SwissArmy knife. I went through my entire bag and couldn’t find anything that would work. Finally Rosie dismantled one of her bracelets and got me a small piece of wire. After figuring out how to extract the SIM on my phone, the rest were easy. The cost of wireless service here is amazing. I got 5GB of data, 200 SMS messages and 10 hrs of voice for $55. We only got Isaac a 5GB data only SIM and it was just $25.
The rest of the day was pretty much a wash. We got to the apartment Rosie rented around 3pm. Everybody crashed for a couple hours and then we walked to diner around 6pm local time. Tonight we are all going to bed early and planning to hit the sites tomorrow.