London, in the After Times
Started: 2023-04-10 20:01:15
Submitted: 2023-04-11 18:20:55
Visibility: World-readable
Visiting London for spring break
In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, trapped in my house by the global pandemic and all the closures and travel restrictions imposed by the virus, I let myself hope for an After Times when I would be free to travel again. I put a note on my todo list to take my kids to London in the After Times, but the closest I got was a Lego Architecture set that Kiesa got me for Christmas. One night I pulled out the set and built it as an emotional support Lego set; then I set it up on my shelf as a promise to myself of a future trip.
The pandemic may not really be over, but I think this is as good as it gets.
We sat down to plan our summer and it turned out that the best time to go to London was during the kids' spring break, the first week of April. This lined up with Easter, which included a four-day bank holiday weekend, and the UK's own school break. Easter weekend also meant a bunch of rail closures for engineering works, including the brand-new Elizabeth Line (which was high on my list of things I wanted to see), but with some careful planning around the holidays I figured we would be fine. The long-term climate data suggested that London on the first week of April would be mostly or partly cloudy with highs in the 50s, and rain some of the time (which roughly matched my own observations from my work trip to London in early April five years ago). The chance of rain didn't really change through the year, only the chance of higher temperatures; so April seemed like a fine time to visit London.
We could get a flight leaving San Francisco on Friday evening, after the kids got out of school, and return on Sunday a week later, the day before they went back to school. I cashed in the travel credit I got when our flight to Seattle for Christmas was canceled and bought plane tickets (and along the way I discovered that I had entered Julian's birthday wrong in my United profile, so they wouldn't let me apply the credit for him and only gave me an unhelpful error message about his name not matching (even though I could clearly see that his name was matching) until I double-checked his other (invisible, on that page) biographical information and discovered the discrepancy).
We left Santa Cruz on the afternoon of Friday, 31st March, after the kids got out of school, to catch United's last flight leaving San Francisco for London at 19:50. (Three airlines operate seven daily departures, plus one more flight from San Jose, giving plenty of options.) The biggest hassle of our departure was getting the scanner at the gate for long-term airport parking to accept the 2d barcode they had given me for advance payment of my parking on my phone; the afternoon sun was shining on my phone's screen and I had to shade the screen with my hand to get the scanner to work.
(The other not-quite hassle of our departure was trying to photograph the airplane sitting at the gate from behind the window-shading dots on the windows from the boarding area, which is how my view of the 787-9 waiting to take us across the Atlantic Ocean looks like I'm viewing it from behind a screen.)
We boarded the plane and found our seats, anchored to a window with Kiesa sitting on the opposite side of the aisle. I let Julian have the window but we've established the expectation that he should keep the window shade open (or, in this case, the window undimmed) so I can lean over him to look out.
This was the first time that Kiesa and Julian have flown on any 787. (Calvin and I first flew in a 787 on our way to India in 2015.)
The timing of our flight, and the in-flight meal service, meant we had to make some awkward choices about when to try to sleep on the flight. By the time the flight attendants came down the aisle in our section of the plane for the first drink service, it was late enough (Pacific time) that I accepted the drink, then tried to get some sleep. This was when I discovered that my seat barely reclined, even though there was no one sitting in the seat behind me, and the neck pillow I brought was too thick to let me lean back in the seat. (The thinner pillows provided on our seats when we boarded wasn't much better.) The rest of my family could put their tray tables down and lie down with their pillow on the tray table, but I was too tall for that so I leaned back and hoped for the best. It mostly worked; I spent maybe seven hours of the ten-hour flight mostly sleeping, waking intermittently to check our progress across North America and over the Atlantic Ocean the flight map, until I woke up to see that it was daylight outside and the time suggested that we'd get our "breakfast" meal service soon.
Clouds obscured Ireland on our route but parted enough that I could see some English countryside as we descended to Heathrow. We dropped through the clouds and, as we landed to the west, I could see the suburbs around London, mixed between small apartments and low row houses each with their own back garden.
We landed and disembarked at the terminal 2 satellite concourse, where we took a long walk in the tunnel under the tarmac to the immigration queues. We ended up in the middle lane, for US passport holders with children too young to use the automatic immigration gates. The immigration officer took a look at our passports and waved us through, without even asking us basic screening questions like how long we were staying for.
We grabbed our bags, exited through customs, and tried to find the local SIM cards I expected to find for sale in the terminal. After wandering the fairly small arrivals area of terminal 2 I discovered I had turned left when I should have turned right, and got three prepaid SIM cards (one each for Kiesa, Calvin, and I).
To get to the tube station we had to take the elevator down from the arrivals level, but the elevator controls seemed inexplicably unable to accommodate crowds of people with luggage. It only provided one elevator per call, and if the call button were pressed again while the doors were open, it would assume we could all fit in the one elevator, even though there were enough people waiting to fill multiple elevators in the same bank.
At the tube station I asked the station agent for a "young visitor discount" on an Oyster card for Calvin, giving him 50% off the adult fare. Julian was free, and the approved way to get him in and out of the fare gates was to have him tailgate with an adult, which took a bit of coordination but proved effective.
Kiesa and I used our contactless credit cards at the fare gates, which whisked open and let us into the station. Since my last visit to London, I've received more contactless credit cards and I've even been able to use them reliably in the United States; each of our cards worked great in the UK as well. (I had a second Oyster card from a previous trip, which I didn't end up using.)
We rode the Piccadilly Line inbound to Gloucester Road in zone one. On an above-ground section of the ride I installed our new local SIM cards in each of our phones and traded numbers so we could remain in touch.
We stayed at Manson Place, a tiny hotel comprised of a block of flats in two adjacent townhomes at the end of a dead-end street half-way between the Gloucester Road and South Kensington tube stations. This hotel understood why one would want a two-bedroom flat for four people and gave us two twin beds in one room for the boys, plus a sitting and dining room and a tiny kitchen.
We arrived at our hotel late in the afternoon, local time, and I refused to do the time zone conversion that would tell me what time it was back home. I took a shower and we headed out to eat supper at Comptoir Libanais South Kensington, a veg-friendly Lebanese restaurant offering an assortment of falafel and humus and other foods. The restaurant was crowded early on Saturday evening, as the nearby museums were closing, but they found a table for us right away.
After eating we stopped by a Tesco Express to get the food we needed for breakfast the next day, then returned to the flat to try to get to sleep and adjust to our new time zone.
