Once breakfast was done we headed out toward Westminster Abbey. We made our normal squiggly route, which is about the closest you can come to a straight line in the maze of one way streets that make up London. Eventually we arrived, driving under Big Ben, and past the House of Parliament.

The grounds of the Abbey are quite interesting. The first chapel was dedicated in 1065, and have been expanded many times since then. The whole grounds are surrounded by various church buildings including two public schools (in the UK a public school is actually a private school). Inside there are of course no pictures allowed, so none to post here, but just a few of the things we saw were the tomb of the unknown soldier, (the only tomb you are not allowed to walk on), the coronation throne, the burial sites of several kings and queens, and those of many poets and great writers including Geoffrey Chaucer, Lewis Carol, and Charles Dickens. Indeed in many ways the entire history of England since the Norman invasion can be seen walking thru Westminster Abbey.

Once we had finished off the Abbey we walked up to see the changing of the horse guard. From there we went up thru St. James Park to Buckingham Palace. This is more of Beci’s sort of place than mine. I can admire the architecture and the grounds, but the fact that kings and queens lived (and live) there doesn’t seem to do anything for me. It is a lovely little house though. Plenty of room for a big screen TV in there I assure you.

After a lovely high tea at a nice place around the corner from the Queen’s house we came back to the Hotel for a bit of a rest. Some people went out to Harrods or a local museum. Some took naps. Some wrote bits of blog entries. The break was well needed, because it would be a long night.

Well rested we headed out to Soho for dinner. We were taken to a very exclusive very private club (Soho house) where we had a great family style dinner right across from the Palace Theatre. Once dinner was done we crossed the street and went into the Theatre for our showing of Mary Poppins. The show was fantastic. It’s based on a combination of the books and the Disney movie, so you get a few extra scenes, and a bit of changes in place of some of the movie bits that would be difficult or impossible to enact in a theatre. It was a tremendous show, and we followed it up with a short tour back stage where we got to see how the sets are manipulated.

All in all, a tremendous day. Tomorrow, The Tower of London.

Out the gate, and right into the immigration line. If you’ve never been thru immigration, it’s the place where every country in the world does their best to convince you that “coming here was a big mistake, mate”. We, and the passengers from a few other early morning international arrivals, made the queue at about the same time. There are two lines. One for UK and EU passport holders. One for the rest of us. Forty minutes later we had moved the requisite 20 yards (as the crow flies) and answered those two vital questions, “Why are you here? When are you leaving?” and moved on to baggage claim.

As chance would have it, our bags made it from the plane to baggage reclaim in almost exactly the same time we did, and were just rolling out of the magic baggage door when I got to the carrousel. We got our bags and moved out of the reclaim area and immediately spotted the Adventures by Disney sign waiting for us. Our greater pulled us out a side exit and lead us to our driver and his very nice Mercedes.

The trip from the airport to our hotel was about an hour, but the driver did a good job of narrating our trip and giving us some light info on what we were seeing. He took past a variety of sights and did a genuinely fine job of getting to very sleep deprived travelers to our hotel in fine style.

Ah, jet lag. Western USA to Europe is the worst jet lag in the world. Nothing could be worse than going 8 hours earlier. This means that in London, you are getting up just as you would be going to sleep at home. So if you don’t work the graveyard shift you’re going to have to adjust, and fast. I have two strategies: First, don’t sleep on the way over, and don’t sleep until night time when you get here. This is the “rip the band-aid off” method.  The second is fly non-stop, and take a sleeping pill and force yourself to get 8 hours of sleep during the London night. Either way, expect to be slightly tired your first couple of days.

Once we got here we took a quick nap and then started to get ready for our first night’s welcome dinner. Beci plugged in the voltage converter, plugged her anti-curling iron thingy (what do I know from women’s hair implements?) and almost immediately noted a burning electronics smell, and a lack of a power light. Disaster number one. We’re totally not sure what went wrong. We plugged in everything correctly, it just died, honest. So down to the concierge, who being a guy, had no idea where to get a hair iron thingy (my name for it). One of our Disney tour guides, Alexandra, came to the rescue and suggested the drug store (chemists) down the street. They not only had what Beci was looking for, they had the same brand in a Europe friendly model. Crisis averted (they always are).

We got back to the hotel in time for the welcome dinner where we had a quick welcome talk by our guides Alexandra and Roni, and a bit of a meet and greet with our fellow travelers. We then went to a wonderful dinner where we had a bit of local cockney entertainment known as the Pearly King and Pearly Queen. Dinner was a gigantic sampler of classic English fare, including fish and chips, meat pies, banger’s and mash, etc. Served along side of it in a Disney first for me, was Pepsi. I have the photo’s to prove it.

Tomorrow morning we’re up early to get our breakfast here n the hotel, and then we’ll head out for our first full day of touring.
More later.

Chris & Beci

Part way thru my packing I noticed something disturbing on the TV. M.I.5 and Scotland Yard had just arrested 21 terrorists who had been planning to blow up some planes going from London to the US. Hurray for Scotland Yard, boo for the terrorists. This did not bode well. Not so much for me, as I operate under the general assumption that I am both the luckiest and the most loved person in the universe, so I simply don’t have to worry about this sort of thing, but Beci has yet to buy into either half of my belief system, and people with bombs generally tend to bother her.

The obvious solution to this situation is to simply not tell Beci that there is any hint of a problem in London. I mean, that’s the logical thing to do, right?

Obviously.

And my plan went well until bed time when she decided that a bit of TV would help her drift off. My suggestion that the Simpsons would be the perfect sleep draught was met with bad news: "I think CNN would be better". And there, splashed all over CNN were very smart looking bobbies mixed in with the more serious anti-terror guys pouring over various buildings, tons of smashing British accents, and the news that I had wisely hidden from Beci for most of the night. So much for my twisted logic. I left everything to the hands of fate and went to sleep at midnight, just 5 hours before we needed to leave for the airport.

At 1:30 AM I woke up to the local side of a phone conversation:

"Did you know that Heathrow is mostly shut down? …. Well it is. … Only if you absolutely have to travel … CNN says they may completely halt all air traffic … Thank you."

I must have looked confused.

"That was Disney. I was just telling them about the arrests in London. They’re looking into it".

I know exactly what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing. Just how powerful is this wife of mine that she can get Disney to investigate complex political events in other countries for her. My second thought was how on earth did she get in touch with anybody at Disney at 1:30 AM!

It turns out that the cool little Adventures by Disney ticket booklet that they gave us had an emergency contact number in the back. Beci called, and they answered. And they did start to investigate what was happening in London. Several conversations and several different and very helpful people later we were informed that the tour was at the very least going to be compressed by one day and most likely canceled entirely as it didn’t look like anybody would be able to get from the US to London. They would know more in two hours Two hours was an hour too long for us, as we would be well into the boarding process by the time they had an answer for us.

"Not a problem", we were told. "Under the circumstances we will happily allow you to reschedule."

Mind you, this is early morning on our day of departure.

At 6:00, as promised, Disney called us back yet again to let us know that the tour would continue, but with the first day trimmed back (not a serious loss, as check-in and the welcome dinner are the only things scheduled for the first day). But for us, and anybody else on the west coast, it probably wouldn’t be possible to make the connections on the east coast and get to London in anything short of two days, so we would be rescheduling. They told us what they had available, we picked a date, and that was it. They were outstanding. Disney is usually pretty good at this sort of thing, but even compared to their best, this was some remarkable customer service.

Now, to top it all off, we had DVC reservations at the Hotel New York at Disneyland Paris for the two days following our tour. Anybody with DVC knows that flexibility is not part of their mantra. We needed to change our DVC booking just 9 days before we were due to arrive. My expectations were low when I called in and pressed ‘3′ about 17 times to get thru their automated menu system.

The agent who answered calmly listened to my long and winding explanation of why I needed to move my reservation. There was a moment of silence on the other end as she likely weighed the odds that this was all a bad joke being played on her by her supervisor. My low expectations dropped even lower (DVC Reservations are the only place where I’m not the luckiest and most well loved person in the world).

"May I have your member number and the name of the person you’ve been working with over at Adventures, please?"

And then I was put on hold for about 10 minutes before she came back and asked me for a number where she could call me back as this was taking longer than she had expected. 30 minutes later she called me back, thanked me for my patience, and said "You’re all set. We’ll send you a new confirmation letter. Have fun in Paris".

What could have been a total disaster, fixing different reservations with different groups in the Disney travel empire, turned out to be one of the easiest fixes you could imagine.

And then I got in my car and drove to work.

Beci and I will let you know how Adventures by Disney rolls in a few weeks.