Day 46 - London, England

Today we begin our journey back to McKinney. We found out yesterday that our hotel was in the “red zone” for the Olympic Marathon route. You know and I know, when it’s red, that is not a good thing. Basically it meant, no taxis because the race route goes right in front of our hotel. We should have gotten up earlier to watch.

That wasn’t a problem as we’d bought four day metro passes so we could train to Orly. Except we have rolling luggage and the stations don’t have much in the way of elevators or escalators. There were stairs, a lot of stairs, and all of the seemed to be up. With four trains and a tram, we made it to Orly airport in about 70 minutes. No problem, we left at 9:30 and our flight was at 1:10.

Then there’s Orly. That was another hour to get to the gate. Checking in our (now expanded) luggage was a long line, and then our terminal was not the one right next to the counter, it was probably half a mile away. Then another long line for security. They are big on bagging liquids here, which I didn’t do. My backpack got pulled over, pawed through, and some sunscreen and a lotion were taken out, put in a baggie, and given back to me. Ok then!

Martha’s Holey Moley bag was also pulled over, but we think that had to do with cords being in a jumble (that medical bag may have been appropriated for some overflow stuff.) Thankfully it was not the kid safety scissors that have surprisingly made it through every checkpoint.

Why did we fly to London and not straight to Dallas? Or why didn’t we train to London? Let’s just call it Olympic pricing. The flights from Paris to Dallas on Sunday were 100% more than from London. And I wanted to train to London because we have not been through the Chunnel, but those prices were also crazy inflated. So we are on a cut-rate airline ORY-LHR. We’ll see how this turns out.

In retrospect, we probably should’ve bitten the bullet and gone for the convenience. For once, I tried to save money and it backfired.

But this way we get to stay at the Hilton Garden Inn between terminals 2 & 3 at Heathrow. It’s one of our favs. The Runway Bar on the 14th floor overlooks the tarmac and you get to watch all of the activity. When we stayed a few years ago, we did not know about the Runway Bar until we got here. Now whenever we have an early Heathrow flight, the Hilton Garden Inn is our go to  as you can walk to the terminals.

Ahhh the Runway Bar, where planes are landing and taking off in front of and behind us. You can actually feel the whoosh! There are 1,400 flights per day at Heathrow (1,800 at DFW), one every 45 seconds. The airport is used by 89 airlines (28 at DFW), offering flights to 214 destinations (254 for DFW) in 84 countries (67 international destinations from DFW).

Heathrow has one tower controlling the airplanes and ground traffic. I asked the bartender and he said this is the new tower. At Heathrow, the air traffic is divided between as many as seven controllers, as there’s too much traffic for one person to handle on their own. The plane goes through so many different people before it even leaves the ground.

Heathrow has two runways (DFW has 7). The Northern Runway is designated 09L/27R, while the Southern Runway is designated 09R/27L. This seems confusing to me - why would you designate them with similar numbers??? Anyway, this afternoon, planes are taking off on 09R/27L and landing on 09L/27R.

Then we found the other side of the Runway Bar! I caught the plane reflected in the glass and Martha caught one taking off over my head.

When we walked in our room, we both stopped. Seriously cold air was blowing out of the air conditioner. I mean seriously cold. We have not felt cold cold AC basically this entire trip. At Julie’s we opened the door because the nights were chilly. Everywhere else, it’s been almost uncomfortably warm in our room. Not tonight, it’ll be soooo chill. Of course we have to get up at the crack of dawn for our flight, but we will sleep well.

Only one more sleep before we go home…