Cheerio!

Well, today is the first day in England that hasn't' been part of traveling. I took off on Friday night and arrived Saturday morning.

The flight was fairly uneventful, but we did end up leaving 1.5 hours late due to inclement weather. Thankfully we made up most of that time in the air and only arrived about 35 minutes later than planned.

I flew standby and was hoping to end up in first class, but alas, coach it was. I was able to sleep a fair amount of the trip so it wasn't that bad.

After going through customs I grabbed the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station and from there picked up the First Great Western train on the British railway to Worcester. It was a lovely view of the countryside and took about 2 hours until I got to my destination.

Now the lovely thing is that I remembered to call my credit cards and notify them that I'd be in England, but forgot that Bank of America credit and Bank of America checking are two totally different entities and so I never notified them that I'd be using the ATMs in England. Consequently cash machines refused to give me any money. Add to that, that I didn't want to take a cash advance off my credit cards and I had forgotten to order British Pounds prior to my trip, and that left me with only credit cards, no cash and a mile and a half distance to the guest house I am staying at. I asked and was told that Taxi's required cash, so I ended up walking the distance with my bags. Oh, did I mention it was raining? Did I also mention that I discovered as I was walking that my nice black shoes that I was wearing apparently have cracks in the rubber soles? Yeah, that was fun.

I finally got to the guest house and checked in just about 1 pm BST (that's British Summer Time or GMT +1 - it's still only 5 hrs different because the US is on DST). I was able to get online (yay free wi-fi in my room) and send off emails saying I had arrived safe and sound and then I crashed and took a mid-day nap. After a few hours I woke up and was able to make plans with Delorey to meet up and head out for dinner. While at his hotel I was finally able to get in touch with Bank of America, clear the block, and authorize ATM access while I'm in England. Within 15 minutes of that phone call I had money, with no ATM fee as an added bonus since I found BoA's British "partner" bank.

John and I had a nice Italian dinner (and by Italian I mean Italian, all of the wait staff spoke Italian greetings to customers and spoke in full Italian to each other) and then we each headed home.

Today I woke up to have breakfast which was a full English breakfast. Bacon, eggs, sausage, toast, and tea. My excitement at this pretty much ended when I saw the "bacon". English bacon is apparently fried fatty ham. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't bacon.

So now I'm just killing time until rehearsal at 2. I'll post more later in the week.