Our Air Canada flight Sunday night left on time, but not without drama. When the gate staff started calling the Waitlisted Executive Class upgrades, my name was 2nd on the list. So when I ran up to the desk to claim our upgrades, I was told that I could get a seat, but that Elaine couldn’t because she doesn’t have Elite status like me and there were other Elite passengers in the list!!! So either I turned it down or one of us could get 1 seat… I turned it down so we could be together. The attendant called the next guy up and it was the same with him, so when he went to discuss it with his wife, the attendant said that if he turns it down she’d give me both seats. But he gave it to his wife! So we were scuppered.
Once we were in the air, we turned on a movie only to find that Elaine’s audio jack was broke and they couldn’t fix it! So we picked a movie we both liked… started them at the same time and shared my audio jack with 1 ear bud for her and 1 for me. Worked, until the whole system in bunch of rows went down. An to make it worse, you couldn’t put on the reading light or turn off the cabin lights, so it was too dim to read and too light to sleep.
Final straw was when we picked our meal, chicken with rice pilaf, the rice pilaf had a peas in it! Actually the real final straw was when we arrived over Heathrow 1 hour early due to strong tail winds only to circle the airport for 30 minutes til 6AM.
Well, they gave us an express pass to get through Security and we got our car early. As we were waiting for our Avis shuttle, I grabbed a shot of a London Black Cab pulling up to the cab stand… to prove we were actually in England! We had a little trouble getting out of the airport onto the M4/M25, but that’s another story!
We ran into lots of traffic on the M25, but Caroline at the Hope Farm B&B at Ightham had our room ready for us when we arrived. That gave us some time regroup and ‘nest’ a little in this fabulous building.
Some pretty scary wildlife at Ightham B&B!
We unpacked a bit, caught our breath, and drove through the teeny, weeny roads to a local pub, The Plough, for a bit of lunch.
After lunch, we spent most of the afternoon visiting Ightham Mote and the beautiful grounds.
Tomorrow we’re going to visit Caterham!