Day 1

We arrived! After all those gruelling hours in a big, comfy first class seat, we touched down at Heathrow. Once again thanks to Emirates, we used our immigration express cards and were through in minutes. Bag retrieval was also quick, and in what seemed like no time at all, we were out of arrivals and heading to our waiting car.

As previously reported we had to travel a day early, thanks to our original flights being cancelled (shout out to the Qantas maintenance folks who ripped the door off an A380!), so we’d had to scramble to find an extra night of accommodation. The apartments we had booked for the week were full, so we ended up at the Marriott Residence Inn in Kensington.

The room was typically English - and by that we mean tiny! If you lie on the bed and throw your arm out to the side, you’d break your wrist on the wall. Thankfully, we were only there to sleep for a night.

What we couldn’t deal with was the fire alarm testing. I’m not sure what was going on, but the alarm was being tested - constantly - between 10am and 6pm. So, we dropped our bags in the room and got the hell out of there!

During the trip over, Rich had discovered that the little info screen on his 360 degree camera wasn’t working, which made it ever so difficult to tell what mode it was in. He needed an Apple store to get it replaced, so that little mission seemed like a good way to fill in some time. We jumped on the C1 bus and headed out to Westfield White City.

White City is huge! Neither of us were really keeping track of the time (other than making sure we weren’t back at the hotel before 6!), but we wandered around for hours.

In our meandering, we noticed there were big sections of crowd control ropes, and security folks managing a queue. “What’s going on?” we wondered, thinking maybe an appearance by someone famous. The truth shocked us: it was people queueing up to buy merch at the Pokémon store!!! The queue looked to be a few hundred metres long. We spoke to a security guard there who advised us that today was a quiet day!

That left us so shaken we had to stop for coffee and cake to recover our composure before finding the Apple Store and getting the camera sorted out. Mission accomplished, we headed for home.

It was at this point - walking back outside in mid afternoon - we were struck by the realities of the UK in mid-November: it was so dark it felt like it was about 9pm, but it was only 4pm. That was okay with us, though, what with jet lag and all, so we figured an early dinner and bed was the plan.

Where better for dinner than the local pub, the Warwick Arms Kensington? And what better than the traditional English fare of a nice curry?

We were exhausted so headed back to our tiny room for some much-needed sleep.