We made it!

One of the most important parts of travel is to ACTUALLY arrive in your intended place of destination, and we can happily inform our readers that we are in fact in Jolly Ole England.
Our travel day started with an early 6am wake-up at our friends Pat and Andy's, followed by some detailed grooming and then an hour of  semi-tense final packing. By semi-tense I refer to my (David) need to have everything in it's place and a place for everything, a temperamental quirk that can be both an asset and a curse, depending on the circumstances at hand. Once we were sure we had everything we would need for the trip we sat around nervously sipping coffee waiting for the Blacklane Car Service.
A day earlier, as we took care of all of the loose ends in preparation, we realized after going through all of our Blacklane material that it didn't say anywhere in the information when (or if) Blacklane would contact you to give you their drivers contact information and to assure you that they were well and truly going to pick you up. We had remembered reading in some review of the company about someone getting contacted an hour before the trip to confirm, but for the life of us we couldn't find anything on Blacklane's Website, or in the information they had sent us confirming this. So the day before our flight Jerani called Blacklane to query them on the subject. The woman who answered the phone knew our travel information without having asked us any questions, by just the number we were calling from, which was pretty impressive and reassuring. She let us know that our reservation was in the system and that we were scheduled for car service the following day at 8:30am and that the driver would be emailing us and phoning us one hour before arrival with his contact information. Jerani reiterated that the house we are staying in is at the end of a long wooded gravel road, sans number or name signage, ten miles outside the Washougal city limits in the Cascade foothills, and that it may be hard to find. The woman on the phone assured us that there would be no problem and that the car would be there at the scheduled time. So we sat nervously drinking coffee until, voila, Jerani got a call from the driver, and he was indeed on schedule and heading our way. An hour later a beautiful brand new black Cadillac Escalade rolled up the steep driveway and parked in front of the house. Marcus our friendly and courteous driver got out and loaded our four bags into the back of the Cadillac and away we went! We had officially started our trip!

Now I'm going to tell you right now, if you've never had the pleasure of using a car service, it's the BOMB! Not only do you get to ride in a chill car, but you don't have to worry about driving and all of the headaches that go along with sorting out long term parking and the airport shuttle. No, you just sit back and chat while the driver does all the work and delivers you right to the United Check-in concourse. Magic! Ah to be rich, one could get use to all of these little perks!
Marcus, our Blacklane driver was exemplary! Not only was he on time, but he was a really nice guy who made the forty minute plus drive pleasant and comfortable experience. He was a true professional.

Once safely inside the airport our baggage check-in and TSA security screen was painless and we settled in for a leisurely breakfast which we finished with an hour to go before boarding.

Finally, after filling our water bottle and some light reading we were ready to board the plane for our four hour flight to Houston, our one and only layover.

Our Economy Plus seating was awesome as ever, with ample leg room and the jet seemed fairly new which couldn't hurt. Soon after we reached cruising altitude we split a bag of fruit and nut roundee's (more on our own wonderful recipe to follow...) and Jerani settled in watching an in flight movie and I broke out the Kindle and read.

A little less than four hours later we set down in Houston, which was a SHOCKING eighty two degrees, and walked somewhere around twenty miles to our connecting flights terminal. (Houston's Airport is HUGE!) Jerani had done a masterful job of scheduling our flights and she gave us three hours in Houston which was just enough time to walk to the terminal and have a wonderful (yes, I said an airport meal was wonderful) meal in a nice seafood restaurant mere yards from our boarding gate. Jerani had a delicious Salmon Fillet Burger and I had a Shrimp Poorboy, washed down with two Hopzilla Beers. The staff was friendly and the food surprisingly tasty.

Now, fully satiated we had just enough time for a quick bathroom break and to queue up in the boarding line. *I'm ALWAYS first in line, sometimes to Jerani's chagrin, but hey, someone has to be, right? *(Actually the First Class Passengers, Global Flyers, people with disabilities, active service people, frequent flyers, families with children two and under, people checking carry-on's to be stowed in the hold, and basically anyone other than the people in our line were actually first, but you get the drift...)

Being an international flight the jet was gigantic and we found our once again spacious Economy Plus seats just past two sections of first class seating. We settled in as the rest of the passengers boarded and set about unloading our flight pillows, inflatable seat cushions, snacks, books and whatever else we had toted along to make our trip somewhat bearable.

As the passengers started to dwindle we couldn't help but notice that NO ONE was seated in the third seat of our three seat row. Oh my GOD, it's like poor man's first class! Three seats for two people! We instantly spread all of our excess gear onto the spare seat, claiming it as our own. It looked like a third world bus seat, heaped with flotsam. We looked around and as the crew shut the door and latched it we realized with glee that this huge jet was only about one half full. A fantastic, weird, and somewhat unnerving occurrence. We couldn't remember the last time we had flown without the jet being packed to capacity. Odd, but we weren't complaining, we had three seats all to ourselves.
The flight to London would take eight and a half hours. We were leaving Houston at 9pm, 7pm Pacific-time, and we were scheduled to land in London at 11:30am the next day, 3:30am Portland time. Try wrapping your head around that; you just know it's gonna mess with your biorhythms big-time at some point in the very near future.

Once the flight was underway Jerani and I watched a free movie on our little private seat-back screens. It was "The girl on the train" which was actually a little disturbing, good, but disturbing. That took up a whole ninety minutes, Hmmmm...only seven hours to go... AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

The rest of the trip was filled with restless, uncomfortable, semi-comatose periods of fitful sleep, light unfocused reading, strange bathroom and stretching breaks in an almost empty and dark jumbo jet, and the constant rearranging of our sitting positions to try to waylay deep vein thrombosis. All in all, a long flight with little to no sleep. As the sun came up over the North Atlantic we were served a breakfast consisting of a damp dreary little croissant, a tiny tub of strawberry jelly and the worst yogurt ever made; I think the brand was "Gak". Oh, I forgot to add one thing. About three hours into the flight we decided to take Nyquil cold relief capsules. No, we didn't suddenly develop colds during the flight, this was a "planned" attempt to use these little green jell caps to help us become sleepy and in turn deliver us a great nites rest. WRONG! Not only did we NOT get a restful nights sleep, in fact we hardly got any sleep whatsoever, and to top it off, as the plane made its final decent into London we both felt spongy, tired and loopy. Ah the best laid plans!

Once on the ground we followed the yellow "this way to customs" arrows about twenty miles through the bowels of Heathrow Airport and after stopping for a quick bathroom break, assured ourselves of about the very last place in a serpentine line of about two hundred people waiting to have their passports stamped. Bad move that bathroom break, that's what Nyquil does for you!

So we shuffled through the customs line with the rest of the huddled masses trying not to look like drug mules or terrorists, something that the harder you try at the more guilty you look, especially coming down off a nyquil binge.

We finally were called up to one of the custom agents, who asked us what our plans in England were? Jerani said that we were on Holiday, to which he replied, "what will you be doing during your stay in London?" I quickly said that we were here to see the sites. To which he replied, "which sites?" Now I've done about four or five straight months of research for this trip, looked into about every possible form of recreational activity Britain has to offer, but at that moment, heavily crashing from a nyquil high, I couldn't think of a one. I stared at the custom agent slack-jawed as he waited for me to name one, just ONE, of the thousands of iconic London sites and after a rather uncomfortable thirty seconds (which seemed like a really long time) I blurted out TOWER BRIDGE, much to I think everyone's relief. Now that it was readily obvious that we were seasoned jet-setters, the custom agent stamped both of our passports and just like that we were allowed into the United Kingdom.

After finding our checked bags just sitting in front of the baggage claim carousel (we were after all the last people from our flight to clear customs), we headed out to the greeting area where a dapper Englishman in a nice black suit waited for us holding a spiffy digital sign reading "HORNE". Oh thank goodness for Blacklane! Our driver led us out of the airport and over to short term parking, asked us to wait while he retrieved the vehicle, and moments later we were speeding along the motorway towards London in a brand new black Mercedes Sedan.

I can't begin to tell you, tired and stretched to the limit as we were, just how nice it was to be able to sit in the back of that luxury automobile chatting with the very cordial and funny British driver as he navigated his way through a maze of confusing switchbacks, circles, and narrow bus and lorry filled streets. After about a thirty minutes drive we arrived at the Chelsea Creek Apartment complex.

We were instructed to pick up our keys for the Airbnb apartment from the concierge's office, but when we exited the car it wasn't obvious just where that might be. Not wanting to hold up our driver as we searched for it we thanked him profusely and as he sped off we went looking for the office. About ten minutes later, having just about circled the large complex we finally stumbled upon it and went through the process of acquiring the keys. Ten minutes after that we were happily inside our modern and posh London apartment! We dragged around putting some of our things away, bone tired and jet legged, we still had some major chores we needed to take care of before calling it a day, After all it was only 1:30pm, and we still needed to find the "3 Store" where we were going to change out the chip in our phone for a UK one, providing us with unlimited data during our stay, and we needed to stop at a grocery store and buy some items to get us started. Jerani had already figured out where the 3 store was located before we left for the trip, so using the existing navigator on her phone we followed it  on a winding one mile route through cobbled alleyways, past Victorian row houses, across dangerously unmarked, albeit small intersections, and finally to the Fulham/Broadway Tube Station with it's many shops and kiosks.

We found the 3 store and had a young lad load our new chip, strolled over to a Sainsbury Grocery and fiddled around picking up an assortment of interesting and very English items including an Indian Curry to-go box for two, some delicious looking shortbread biscuits and some pork rashers. Loaded down with groceries we made one last stop at a Starbucks for an Americano and retraced our route home.

Feeling dog tired but smug for having survived our first foray into a foreign land we cooked up some surprisingly tasty Indian food and about four hours too early fell asleep on a blissfully comfortable bed.