Our Excellent English Irish Adventure – Part 1

The Rigours of Travel

People who say “getting there is half the fun” have never travelled by air. Travelling anywhere of sufficient distance is an energy-draining exercise.

As my blog title has given away, we’re in London right now, having arrived here yesterday afternoon. I can say with absolute certainty that the first day of arriving anywhere after being on a plane for about 9 hours is not going to be good. Of course, all four of us are excited to be here but that’s all being tempered with our bodies screaming out to us that we should be sleeping right now.

Well, you can’t travel without the jet-lag now, can you?

We’re travelling with Peter and Liz on this trip to England and Ireland and all four of us felt the same when we arrived at our hotel in London: we were all really hungry and all really tired. Hunger won out and we found a local place to eat around the corner.

All of us were fading pretty quickly and while we all tried to make a good effort to walk around the Notting Hill area where we were staying by about 5 PM my other three travel companions were ready to call it a day and we all headed back to our hotel. Within minutes Barb was sleeping.

But I wasn’t done. I did some quick research and was back out into the night by myself. There were several places in London that I wanted to go to so I could get some night shots and my desire to get out into the night overrode my desire to sleep. 15 stops from our hotel on the London Underground got me to my destination, the London Bridge. I had dinner in the area and was able to get a number of shots including walking over the bridge which was well-lit up at night.

All in all the walking did me a world of good to get over the jet lag and by the time that I got back to the hotel around 10 PM I was able to get a reasonably good night’s sleep. A promisingly good start to our Excellent British Irish Adventure.

Baden