London-Heathrow

Customs in London took forever. I’ve gotten a little spoiled by Global Entry coming home. But we waited and made it through without incident. Our initial plan had been to take the London-Heathrow Express in to London, using our BritRail pass. We would then transfer from Paddington to Waterloo, where we could take another train to Salisbury.

With our bags at the airport
From the left: Jerynn, Dani, Ann, me

Ann’s neighbor, however, had offered a “faster” plan. We took a taxi to the station in Woking and took the train from there to Salisbury. The taxi to Woking cost $125 and took an hour and a half. We should have used our BritRail passes for the train from Woking to Salisbury, but we didn’t get them validated because Woking was such a small station. This may have saved us money if we had used that unused day of train travel, but our trip was pretty tightly scheduled so we didn’t get to take advantage of that. This may have been faster at a different time of day, but with the traffic we encountered, it unfortunately did not feel any faster.

We arrived at the train station in Salisbury and walked to Qudoes, where we were staying that night. It was just under a mile walk from the train station. After that walk and given the time of night, we decided to eat dinner at the pub at Qudoes. Perhaps we were hungry because it was a very good meal. That night, I shared one room with Dani, Ann and Jerynn shared another room, and mom had the third room. We were on the second floor above the pub. There was a game on when we were finishing dinner, so we worried that it would be loud. But by the time we went to bed, the game must have been finished because we couldn’t hear the shouting from below.

Our first meal in London
From the left: Jerynn, Mom, Dani, me, Ann

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. Dani woke up shortly after and we lay in the dark talking for entirely too long. I managed to get back to sleep. I’m not sure if Dani did, but she made the best of it the following day.