Planes, Trains & Automobiles

Or more aptly… Automobiles, Light-Rails, Shuttles, Planes, & Buses.

Our journey from Baker City to London has been undertaken with an array of vehicles and has taken us over two days to complete. We drove for about 5 hours from Baker City to Portland on Friday. Checked into our Super 8 Motel near the airport and then returned our rental car to Thrifty down the block, after which we hopped back on the shuttle so we could take the Portland MAX light-rail from the airport to go into town to meet K’s sister for dinner. It was too short a visit, but we had a nice time and had some fantastic Thai food at Typhoon (highly recommended!), but back to the travel story. We took MAX back to the airport and waited for a Super 8 shuttle that never arrived. So we got on the Thrifty shuttle under false pretenses, then we walked from Thrifty to our motel to try to get about 5 hours of sleep.

Next “day”, we got up at 4am (West coast time) and took a 5 o’clock shuttle to the airport. Then it was a two-engine prop plane to SeaTac airport (Seattle-Tacoma) followed by a 30-second tram ride to another terminal where we boarded a “big plane” to Boston (a 5-hour journey). When we arrived in Boston, we disembarked in a domestic terminal which had no direct connection to the international terminal, so we had to exit and take a Logan airport shuttle. After sitting around for a few hours (and having piss-poor salads at Houlihan’s), we boarded the flight to London. A fairly smooth flight with a few hair-raising encounters with abrupt turbulence over London. We arrived near terminal 4 and were herded into shuttle buses to take us to the gate...

...but it seems as soon as we got to England, things went to shit.

There was a little over an hour to catch our National Express coach to Bournemouth, we just needed to get our luggage. We waited for an hour, watching the conveyor belts extrude bags painfully slowly in a piece-meal fashion. Ours never arrived – most probably due to negligence since it was all four bags missing and I know they made it to Boston because I happened to glance out the window and see a couple of them coming out on the conveyor. So we had to go through the rigmarole of reporting our missing bags, during which we missed our coach to Bournemouth. We tried for it anyway, just in case the coach was late, but forgot that we had to take a subway train to the main terminal where the bus station is and then walk about a mile in underground passageways before reaching our destination. The bus had long gone, so we had our ticket changed to another bus leaving an hour later.

It was a tough two hours on that bus, spent wishing that time would speed up just for a little while. I kept nodding off and then get startled awake everytime the bus hit a bump and thinking I was in an airplane that just landed on the runway. But we're home now. A couple of our plants on the balcony are dead. It must not have rained at all while we were gone. Oh, and there's a 6-7 foot massive fissure in one of our bedroom walls. Was there an earthquake while we were gone? Surely not in Bournemouth!

We watered everything and opened some windows to air the place out and then headed to the supermarket to get some basic provisions (plus bathroom essentials for K, since everything was in the suitcases). Now we've taken showers with our ridiculous water pressure and are looking for things to keep us busy and awake until it's at least dark.

The lukewarm welcome from England aside, the weather is absolutely gorgeous today! Just perfect!