Sunday - March 22 - Leaving London...

It seems like we had just arrived a day or so ago and here we were having to pack our bags yet again - this time to leave London! While we certainly weren't happy with this gross miscarriage of justice we're sure our pocketbooks were breathing a sigh of relief. Despite all the sights we had missed (like St. Paul's Cathedral, Kew Gardens, the Tate Modern, etc.), we had a great visit -- not to mention most excellent accommodation from our fine hosts.

We departed determined to come back to this great city and finish what we had started.

Finished the packing we had started last night and, after doing a final look over to see if we had left anything, said goodbye to Issy and left the S. Kensington apartment which had been our home for the past week. We took some final photos of this area including one phonebooth photo which had irritated Charles for the last few days - check out the wretched pizza 'hut' kid for yourself - 'woohoo' indeed.

We made the trek one last time down the street to the Gloucester Station to wait for the Picadilly Line which would take us straight to Heathrow Airport. Being from LA we weren't used to such simplicity and convenience in modern mass transportation. This was even simpler than our Hong Kong departure last year.

We had wised up regarding the crappy United flight on the way to London and decided to purchase the "Economy Plus" upgrade prior to our departure. We chose seats that were towards the middle, with no seats behind us. The only drawback was that they were near the bathroom which turned out not to be not as horrendous as we thought. Whatever - nothing could be worse than the misery of the flight up so were looking forward to getting some rest on the way back. The nice part about the return flight was that we were able to get caught up on our movie viewing, both of us watching about three movies each.

Laura's parents picked us up at LAX and we headed to a nice Italian meal together which gave us a chance to excitedly share stores about our trip.

Remembering the horrible jetlag from our SE Asia trip last year we had (wisely) decided to take Monday off to "recover" (in one person's case - two days off!) This did not turn out to be quite so necessary - by forcing ourselves to stay awake until 10:30 PM we didn't really experience jetlag. We went to bed a little earlier than usual but nothing like the week or so it took us to recover last year!

We took a walk down to Palisades Park in Santa Monica. It was a gorgeous, typical, sunny day. We checked our e-mail later and saw a message from Issy. Just as she predicted the weather became gloomy the day after we left!