I flew over to the UK on Friday for a week's vacation. Good points: Virgin Atlantic upgraded us from Economy to Premium Economy for free; service was excellent. Bad points: the flight was oversold, and it took Virgin an hour to sort out who's on and who's off. And it was a daytime flight - I was neutral, but my wife preferred it. After the event, I am no longer neutral. Daytime eastbound transatlantic SUCKS. Instead of having a short, broken night which stresses your body into taking up the new schedule, you have a short broken day, so it's impossible to get to sleep. Never again.
Normally when we come to Oxford we stay with relatives, but this time it wasn't convenient, so we stayed at a random motorway-type hotel at the A34/A40 intersection. On Saturday morning we walked into the Little Chef diner next door for breakfast, and I saw a WiFi hotspot sign. "Heaven, I'm in heaven..." So that's where I am now. (And of course the setup time on my PowerBook was just as long as it took me to type in a credit card number to buy a few hours of credit. Sweet.)
The weather here is perfect, and forecast to remain that way for our stay. So more anon, with pics (and perhaps video).
Posted by geoff2 at September 5, 2004 04:47 PMif you go on a shark-hunting expedition, let me know and i shall ride up... 8-)
In the small, quaint village that is London (!) I'm sure you ran into Jill-Bob? She's been in London for the past 10 days or so, and I'm due to fetch her from DFW this afternoon; she parked her car at my home while away.
I just checked aa.com and it says her flight left LGW 3 minutes late, and will be in Dallas 6 minutes later than scheduled. Gotta wonder about those extra 3 minutes, eh?
Today, I added 6 Iraqi blogs to my RSS feed and have been reading them for additional insights into what's really happening Over There. I can no longer trust any US Media to tell the story (especially not GOP-TV, er, Fox News).
A friend from TBA (The Bay Area) is visiting today; she bought a Toyota Prius from a dealer in Louisiana and is driving it cross country (to avoid the $2500-ish markup in California). She promised to let me drive it a bit, so I'll blog on that after the fact. It's a bit rainy with an occasional clap of thunder, 85F.
Posted by: Gene Bob at September 6, 2004 08:58 AMShark hunting? In Oxfordshire?????
(Shades of Monty Python.....)
And no, I haven't been to London so far - and we probably won't make it: we have to go to Warwick and Saffron Walden this week. But we did buy £150 worth of books at Blackwell's....
Posted by: Geoff Arnold at September 6, 2004 09:33 AMremember the headington shark? in the roof?
England or bust is it, well it beats the weather in florida, and oh yes Geoff I did finally get a chance to check out your website. It's funny that the day I get to check your website out is the day that I am all by myself at work. Anyways hope your vacation and the grandma both are swell. Your son-in-law.
Posted by: Mark Gallagher at September 7, 2004 03:33 PM