Arriving in England

We stumbled off the plane at Heathrow in a jet lagged daze with our paltry 130kgs of luggage. Yep, we like to travel light, just the essential stuff; normal clothing for traveling, camera gear, and the necessary sailing gear for one’s self and the boat and clothing for a winter crossing of the North Sea. Our collection included two massive roller suitcases, two massive backpacks, two smaller backpacks, a mandolin, a trumpet, and two handbags. While travelling with all this stuff is fine while you are sitting on the plane and it is all snug somewhere in the cargo hold, it becomes a very different story once you are on the ground in a foreign country and eyeing off the options for getting to where you need to go by public transport. Happily London’s subway (Tube or whatever it is they call it) is actually pretty friendly to over-ladened travellers, particularly if you strike it at the right time. However, once off the train, hauling all that stuff to and from hotels and stations is a complete misery. Own fault, I guess.

Well, we did it. First searching for the right exit to get us out of Heathrow, the airport, to Heathrow, the tube station. Then from Liverpool Street station through sunny but sub-zero streets to our hotel. On that walk the weight of our luggage combined with the weight of the weariness from our traveling nearly pulled my arms from my shoulders and my equanimity from what remained of my consciousness. I was honestly almost in tears. I guess I was a bit tired.

After shoe-horning our luggage into the hotel room we did a zombie walk around town. Neither of us had ever been to London, or the UK, so in part it was to see this famed city. In part it was a jetlag strategy, stay awake until the new normal bed time. And so, we walked in the day’s fading light from Spitall Fields down to the London Bridge and looped back over the Tower Bridge and home again via a particularly poor but expensive Thai restaurant. What did we see? Bricks, glass, concrete, buildings, bridges, a river and hordes of people bundled up against the cold. Some of it added up to some impressive vistas, much of it was just city, and all of it was largely lost on me. I think I was tired.