Sabbatical Blog: 9/15 London, UK - Washington, DC

9/15 Flying to Washington D.C.
Today we began our day with packing up for the flight home. This time we have a daytime flight. We flew out of London Gatwick this time. Our day began with a rush to get packed since I didn’t wake Traci up at 7AM like I should have. We got out act together (maybe the adrenaline helped), and made got a Taxi to Victoria Station. This was the first London Cabbie that actually talked to us. He even got out to help us with our luggage when we got to the Train station. This is what we were used to from our past experiences, but the whole time in London, we rarely had a cabbie who talked to us much more than, “where to?”

We lucked out, as soon as we got to the Train platform, there was a Gatwick Express Train, nearly ready to depart. We loaded up and within 30 minutes we were at the Airport. We made it to the Continental counter in time for them to close our flight behind us. Much better than last time we flew out of London. I originally budgeted for 2 hours in advance, and Traci thought we only needed 1.5 hours… I think the truth is you need 2.5 hours if you account for all the security checks and queues. None-the-less we made it…

… Well, all except for one of our bags. The Baby backpack, at Gatwick, they don’t put the backpacks on the conveyor, even though we had it bagged in plastic. Who knows where our backpack ended up, but it wasn’t on the Baggage Claim conveyor for Customs clearance. We were told to notify the Baggage claim agent in Washington D.C. when we get there.

Because of the delay in waiting for our missing luggage we missed our connecting flight to D.C. So they put us on the next flight at 5PM. It’s only a 45 minute flight from Newark to Washington D.C. Pretty quick, but not long enough for me to finish the Sudoku puzzle in the flight magazine.

When we got in, we headed over to Hertz to claim our rental car that will take us all the way down to Florida. They initially had us in a Mazda 6. This would’ve been okay, but we couldn’t fit our luggage in the trunk, so they got us a Suburu Outback wagon. It is a little smaller than the Ford Mondeo wagaon we had in England, and much weaker in the way of Horsepower. Oh well, it will be fine.

We had a short 5 mile drive to our hotel, the Westin Grand. It’s not the nicest hotel we’ve been in, but is reasonably nice. The problem with these city hotels, is that there is no parking. So we’re always paying for parking or valet parking…. Then we have to deal with the valet guys giving us the “tip me” look.

Needless to say, we didn’t do much this night other than drive around a bit to see some of the sights.

We don't have many pictures from this day. This was on the Gatwick Express. 30 minutes from London to the airport.


And this was in Newark, before we caught our next flight to D.C.