The great project: getting to Windsor on a grey and rainy day

 As a friend of mine remarked after reading my blog and remembering her own experiences sleeping at an airport one long ago Christmas: “Just keep thinking of it as an adventure.” An adventure testing what stamina we have left in our elder years for sure. At least we haven’t slept at an airport (so far, we still have tomorrow to get through.) 

I didn’t see Elizabeth at King’s Cross yesterday. After writing my blog and taking a shower, I realized I was not feeling up to socializing. For Elizabeth’s sake as much as mine. I think Elizabeth might have been secretly relieved, she replied that we had looked a bit like the Marley brothers’ ghosts when she saw us on Wednesday—sans clanking chains but I certainly felt like I was dragging as did Richard. I was all for hanging out at the hotel all day but after eating what the hotel had to offer in the way of breakfast, Richard said he was up for going back to Piccadilly and revisiting Hatchard’s for reading material. So we traveled back into London, the weather thankfully sunny, and revisited first our favorite cafe at the Royal Academy and then Hatchards and Waterstone’s. And then we went to the M & S Food Express at Terminal 2, loaded up with sandwiches and trifle cups, fruit cups, and went back to the hotel. As I said, at least the weather was sunny and I took some final photos of the area around Piccadilly.

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I decided to bring out the lovely tea tray that Elizabeth had given me for Christmas to make my M & S feast a bit more elegant. I didn’t use the William Morris fabric napkins though.

There was an NCIS marathon on telly—come to London and watch NCIS, such is modern travel. I wondered if this hotel had been one of the so-called “COVID hotels” where folks had had to quarantine a couple of years ago. The upside would have been clean and comfortable (once you figure out how the heating works); the downside would have been the in-house restaurant food.

It’s really nasty looking outside this morning but we have non-refundable tickets to Windsor Castle this afternoon so we are preparing to bundle up and find our way out there. Certainly not the holiday we had planned but at least it’s provided grist for the writing mill and, so far at least, we’ve been able to regard it from a kind of wry “we are still very lucky” point of view.

And now to Windsor