Day 1.25

We made it to London. The flight was pretty good. We arrived at the airport with lots of time to spare. We had one packing snafu (at least that we have thought of thus far) but luckily, our neighbor was able to drive it ½ way to the airport and Scott’s parents were able to get it and bring it back to us before we even went to the gate. And, we were automatically upgraded to Economy Plus without me even having to tell them about all of the misery we had on our non-existent flight to Nantucket the weekend before. Everyone slept for at least part of the way which was great. We arrived at 10:30 am in London and began our hike to immigration. I didn’t remember how far it was from where we landed to the immigration line. But with 8 carry-ons + American girl dolls & pillow pets (making 2 of us unable to help with the actual bags), I felt as if it took us forever to get there. Then we exited into the sea of drivers holding up names and we did not see ours. So we waited until we found our driver – very nice man who was looking for us I think in Terminal 3 and we were in Terminal 1. Once we divided up the suitcases between the taxi driver and Scott’s rental car, we were off to see our new home for 10 weeks. Emily & I went with the driver and Scott and Ainsley braved the left-side driving themselves in the rental car. Even though we had to walk with our bags from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3 to get to the car, the driver arrived first and we were greeted by Jenna & Scarlett, two co-workers at Scott’s “new” company. We heard tales that Scott had called from the road and it reminded the women of Chevy Chase in National Lampoons European Vacation – “Hey look kids there’s Big Ben.” So Emily & I got the tour of the house ourselves. The house is very big. It is a row home that they added a connection to a cottage in the rear of the row home making it one large, long combined house with two wings effectively. The women took the liberty of stocking the fridge with some essentials to get us started which was BRILLIANT because we were all starving by the time we arrived at the house. While we snacked, we tried to find any paperwork about the house – like how to operate the alarm system, the tv (there are only 4 stations that we were able to get reception on), the heating/AC (it was chilly), how to get hot water and where the supposed online connection was and if there was a password. Unfortunately in England, they don’t seem to do that with rental homes because we found some instructions, but not all in a little file. We decided to go to the pub at the end of the block to get some more food so I went to close the overhead window. Jenna & Scarlett had pointed toward the door when they said that is how I could operate the window so I pushed the only button I could see near the door, a large red button next to the door – BIG mistake as that was a panic button and set the alarm off. So the alarm went off for 12 minutes because as I previously said, the owners had not left us any information on how to disarm it or how it worked in general. And we got to meet 2 lovely police officers who came to check on the house since the alarm was going off. Luckily it stopped on its own after 12 minutes when the police officers were here trying to disarm it as well. As the one police officer said – we were announcing our arrival when we set the alarm off – "the Americans are here!" The rest of the day was pretty uneventful – us trying to log on to the internet and unpack and decide on rooms. Hopefully tomorrow will provide us with better connection to the outside world.

Pictures to come.