Travel Preamble
May. 20th, 2024 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calzephyrThe best way to start off this travel diary is mentioning travel itself. We quickly realized how rusty we were at vacation planning back in February. This was our first vacation since 2019 and the first time I’ve flown internationally in 40 years. 36 years for hubs. Frequent flyers we’re not.
I bought a crossbody bag for all my essentials since I was paranoid about losing my wallet/phone/passport/credit card and a TURTL neck pillow which I didn’t get to use much on our nine hour flight from YYC to LHR. We’d only flown to the US in previous years, which always seemed to require extra layers of screening.
The fight itself was miserable as most nine hour flights go. I sat in the dreaded middle seat. We left in the evening with the idea that we would nap on the plane. Wrong! Although we had a nice meal and a snack on Air Canada, people would just not turn the brightness down on their seat back screens! I micro-napped but every time something flashed on the screen to my left in front of me I thought we were encountering lightning. The passenger on my right had a hard time getting comfortable and stole part of the blanket I brought for myself :-D The last three hours was marked by a crying toddler who couldn’t settle down. After a while my husband and I were laughing because he was fake crying for attention kind of like our cockatiel used to. We later saw the mom carrying her son over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes through the airport. If premium economy wasn’t an extra $2000 we might have splurged on it :-D
The same thing happened on the return flight, except the toddler scream cried most of the way except during brief naps. At the very end of the flight he tuckered himself out and his dad carried him out asleep. I felt bad for the parents because the kid had so much energy and banged on his dad. At one point the dad covered his hands in his face and that's what I tried entertaining the kid with every little kid song I remembered whenever he looked over the seat. It was such a relief to get back home, I tell you!
Okay, so back to Heathrow, because we held Canadian passports, we breezed through security easy peasy. There were self-serve gates where we just had our faces and passports scanned and it was on to the luggage carousel. It was weirdly simple, almost too simple. From there we caught a cab and it was so neat to just load up with our luggage with us in the cab. The driver is protected by a plastic cage. There’s no need for any interaction at all as you can pay from the back seat.
We were also amazed by how frequently buses and Tube trains arrived, even in little Milton Keynes, which is under 300k people. Buses were coming every 7 to 10 minutes, whereas here you can wait 15 minutes to half an hour, or sometimes an hour for your bus to come. Same for the Tube. It was a little confusing to figure out which platform we were on at first. Now here's the crazy thing--we took the train from London to Milton Keynes for 36 pounds round trip. And it got us there in half an hour. We don't have inter city trains and we barely have inter city buses because cars are king in Alberta.
It would open so much in the way of opportunity if we had some kind of linked rail system. Below is the speed my husband clocked the Avanti train at. It's hard to come back home after a trip like this and see how people get around so effortlessly. It feels like they're living in the future and we're living in horse and buggy days!
I bought a crossbody bag for all my essentials since I was paranoid about losing my wallet/phone/passport/credit card and a TURTL neck pillow which I didn’t get to use much on our nine hour flight from YYC to LHR. We’d only flown to the US in previous years, which always seemed to require extra layers of screening.
The fight itself was miserable as most nine hour flights go. I sat in the dreaded middle seat. We left in the evening with the idea that we would nap on the plane. Wrong! Although we had a nice meal and a snack on Air Canada, people would just not turn the brightness down on their seat back screens! I micro-napped but every time something flashed on the screen to my left in front of me I thought we were encountering lightning. The passenger on my right had a hard time getting comfortable and stole part of the blanket I brought for myself :-D The last three hours was marked by a crying toddler who couldn’t settle down. After a while my husband and I were laughing because he was fake crying for attention kind of like our cockatiel used to. We later saw the mom carrying her son over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes through the airport. If premium economy wasn’t an extra $2000 we might have splurged on it :-D
The same thing happened on the return flight, except the toddler scream cried most of the way except during brief naps. At the very end of the flight he tuckered himself out and his dad carried him out asleep. I felt bad for the parents because the kid had so much energy and banged on his dad. At one point the dad covered his hands in his face and that's what I tried entertaining the kid with every little kid song I remembered whenever he looked over the seat. It was such a relief to get back home, I tell you!
Okay, so back to Heathrow, because we held Canadian passports, we breezed through security easy peasy. There were self-serve gates where we just had our faces and passports scanned and it was on to the luggage carousel. It was weirdly simple, almost too simple. From there we caught a cab and it was so neat to just load up with our luggage with us in the cab. The driver is protected by a plastic cage. There’s no need for any interaction at all as you can pay from the back seat.
We were also amazed by how frequently buses and Tube trains arrived, even in little Milton Keynes, which is under 300k people. Buses were coming every 7 to 10 minutes, whereas here you can wait 15 minutes to half an hour, or sometimes an hour for your bus to come. Same for the Tube. It was a little confusing to figure out which platform we were on at first. Now here's the crazy thing--we took the train from London to Milton Keynes for 36 pounds round trip. And it got us there in half an hour. We don't have inter city trains and we barely have inter city buses because cars are king in Alberta.
It would open so much in the way of opportunity if we had some kind of linked rail system. Below is the speed my husband clocked the Avanti train at. It's hard to come back home after a trip like this and see how people get around so effortlessly. It feels like they're living in the future and we're living in horse and buggy days!
