If it’s Thursday this must be Heathrow

 No, we aren’t flying home yet; that’s Saturday. We hope. Good thing we aren’t flying Southwest; daughter Laurie and family were meant to fly home from Sacramento yesterday but Southwest cancelled their flight (and about 1,000 others) with no rebooking until January 1st. CJ needs to get home for work so they hired a minivan for their 6 people plus luggage and according to the last update, having driven about 10 hours, they are 2 hours from Phoenix. They will arrive at roughly the same time they would have if they had flown; but they left several hours earlier of course. Traveling at Christmas, yuck. Driving home wouldn’t be an option for us of course :) 

Although, R keeps saying that he would rather be taking the Queen Mary back. He’s not looking forward to another grueling 10 hour flight wedged into Premium Economy. I remind myself that the grandparents crossed the Atlantic in a whole lot less comfortable circumstances. I don’t think they would have any sympathy for our complaining. 

Anyway, when did I last leave off writing? Oh yes, Christmas night. I didn’t do very much Boxing Day. R was laid up in bed so I went out when some of the shops opened at 8:30 and found some breakfast sandwiches (and good coffee at Paul’s, yay!) Came back to the hotel and mooched around, watching Christmas specials on telly—Call the Midwife, Doc Martin, Death in Paradise, old movies like Battle of Britain—reading and so on.

I went out to another hole in the wall restaurant at about 5:00 pm for dinner. Most restaurants along the Earls Court Road are wedged in small spaces, hence my saying “hole in the wall”—it isn’t a judgement on the food which is filling and yummy. The Earls Court area is typical of the “real” London: lovely old Georgian buildings, most of which have been converted into inexpensive (for London) hotels or flats. As I walk by I look up at the windows and instead of the expensive draperies I would see in Kensington just a few blocks away, I see net curtains and the glow of fluorescent ceiling lights. 

And the people crowding the sidewalks—littered with bags of trash put out for the bin men—are mostly from South Asia. Which makes for a great choice for eating along Earl’s Court Road. Will it be the Halal Guys? Maybe Indian? Malaysian? With Richard not along—he doesn’t like any kind of spices—I settle for Japanese, reassuring the doubtful hostess that if she will give me a table I will eat fast and not impact the later reservation. Mmm! Yakitori chicken and a bowl of skinny vegetarian yakisoba noodles. 

I bring the leftovers back but by the time I return, I am beginning to feel chilled and shivery. Funny, I felt fine at the restaurant but about an hour after I take my jacket off in the hotel room, my fingers are shaking and, oh damn, I am starting a fever. We are now both sick—who is going to forage for food for us tomorrow?

I actually did manage to shlepp out Tuesday morning, grabbed another breakfast sandwich for R and my usual croissant (couldn’t face coffee though) and scurried back to the hotel. We spent the rest of the day sleeping; Elizabeth had invited us to see a special exhibition at the V & A Museum but that wasn’t going to happen 😢 At that point—Tuesday—the goal was to get better so we can fly home on Saturday.

Wednesday we did feel slightly better so we joined  Elizabeth at Tate Modern to see the Cezanne Exhibit. I wish I understood art in the way that the exhibition catalogue describes it. That I could look at paintings and see the emotional depth in them and say “Oh yes, I can see where those mountains represent Cezanne’s frustration over the Franco Prussian War.” To me, they are mountains—recognizable as mountains with shadings and I definitely am in awe of his talent with color and so on but the deep meanings would have escaped me had it not been for the catalogue. Oh well, I do think his still life series on apples is beautiful.

We had to pack up and change hotels on Wednesday too. We had to do that early, so that we could get out of the room and store the luggage before going to the Tate. I was a bit lightheaded still though and my packing was rather haphazard. Or so I discovered last night, when we arrived at the Heathrow hotel: things were really jumbled in the suitcases. One of my favorite scarves is missing. I am fairly certain it wasn’t left at the hotel though, maybe I dropped it somewhere. 

Oh well, scarves can be replaced more easily than something really important like passports or credit cards. And if I have to sacrifice a scarf to the gods of better health so we can enjoy these last two days, I will do it 😉 I don’t think R will be coming into London today with me for lunch with Elizabeth at King’s Cross so I will have to leave some money and a credit card with him—remember, he left his wallet at home. He was worried about the name on the card being mine and not his but when you tap instead of insert they don’t care. And many places are cashless. I fear I will be bringing home most of the cash I took out of that ATM at the airport and good luck to converting that in Sierra Vista. But again, with so many wonky things going on for this trip, converting pounds sterling is a minor inconvenience.

I haven’t been taking many photos but here are two: a rain soaked view of the mews walk leading to our hotel at Earls Court. By the way, my cousin Hilda said I shouldn’t refer to our hotel as being in Earls Court instead of Kensington because it’s just not a top drawer area. Bless her, things like that matter to her. All I care about is that it was clean, safe and comfortable and it was all that. And I took the second two photos through the window at the restaurant at the Tate looking across the Thames to St Paul’s.