We took a tour of Salisbury, Stonehenge, and Bath today. We arrived at the pick-up spot for the bus at 0830 and it was COLD. Would have been better if I had brought a jacket but it warmed up later.

The first stop on the tour was the city of Salisbury. We toured the Cathedral there. Contained in a small chapter house adjoining the Cathedral is the most legible of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta. It’s pretty sobering to see this document that partly forms the basis for our Constitution (even though it’s principles have been shit on in recent years). After our tour of the Cathedral, the group had lunch at a pub in Salisbury. It was our first pub experience and it was pretty good. Karen had bangers and mash and I had beef stew.
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First stop, the Tower of London. We were able to view the Crown Jewels (no photography allowed). Lots of large diamonds. Something that was at the end of the exhibit was the Deluxe Edition of a board game called Outrage!. Imagine my shock when I discovered the Deluxe Edition costs $14,900. Listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the most expensive board game in the world. I’ll pass on this one.

While at the Tower, Karen took a picture with the first female Beefeater. I’ll have it up as soon as I can get this gallery crap working right.

The real treasure of the trip came when we visited The Who Shop. We bought a few things from there and talked with the shopkeepers for a long while. One directed us to the Earl’s Court Underground Station. Right outside the station was the last remaining Police Box in London.

As was predicted, Tuesday was incredibly rainy. Not very hard, just a lot of rain - all day. The day didn’t start in the morning, though, ’cause we slept in.
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Today’s plan was the Natural History museum, lunch, then the Science Museum followed by a visit to Harrods and Harvey Nichols.

We arrived at the Natural History Museum behind a school field trip. The inside of the museum itself is pretty big. It reminded me a lot of Hogwarts. Karen said it reminded her of the Scarlet Monastery. We got tickets to the Antarctic exhibit. The exhibit started with a cold room…cold to the tune of -10 degrees (14 Fahrenheit). As soon as we walked in, I had ice crystals form in my nose. Really, though, that was the best part of the exhibit. The rest of it was some interactive exhibits on life in Antarctica. Some of them had some good advice.
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Our hotel room is small. Most hotel rooms in the UK are small. That’s just the way things work here. For those of you that have seen the house I grew up in, the room is slightly smaller than my old bedroom. Co-workers, we’re looking at slightly bigger than a CS office. Despite the room being smaller than I’m used to, I can’t say enough good things about this hotel. The staff is friendly, the bus stops right in front, necessary stores and a few restaurants are within 1 block of the place.

As I said earlier, upon arrival, we took showers and headed out. We could not afford to go to sleep until it was time to do so. The original plan was to hit the London Eye and then Namco Station followed by some essentials shopping and dinner.

We left the hotel and had lunch at a nearby restaurant called Peking Duck. This was our first experience with London dining. The food was very good. My chicken fried rice came with the vegetables mixed in the we usually only find in mall Chinese food in the States. This tasted better than any fried rice from the mall that I’ve had. I learned some important things at lunch:
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We got to the airport around 1300. We spent the next couple of hours waiting for our flight to Houston.

Navigating the Houston airport was a pain in the ass. It was made less of a pain in the ass by these. Last time I saw one of these, there were a bunch of zombies on it. Anyway, we ate dinner and proceeded to the gate.

At the gate, the gatekeepers had just started checking passports. After waiting in line for a few minutes, I got a stern lecture from a foreigner in her 60s about the condition of my passport. I went to my happy place while waiting for the old twat to finish. You see, my passport was slightly bent. If you lay it on its back, it looks like a semicircle instead of an underscore. This is because the US Post Office likes to employ lazy fucks that don’t give a shit about the mail they deliver as long as it gets in that mailbox any way it can. The mail carrier crushed my passport under the weight of 2 magazines. I got past that pretty quickly but now I had a foreigner giving me shit about the condition of a US passport belonging to US citizen in a US airport. But, I digress.

We arrived in London around 0945 local time (that’s 0345 for you guys back home). I slept a total of 1 hour on the plane and was bored to tears ’cause my laptop wouldn’t work with the in-flight power system. Luckily, though, amongst Continental’s in-flight entertainment selections were 3 episodes of House, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Live Free or Die Hard.

We took the Gatwick Express from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Station. The trip is supposed to be about 30 minutes but was more like 2 hours because of a fatality somewhere on the track. We walked to our hotel (when we really should have taken the bus), took showers, and began day 1.