Arrival in London

Our flight to Heathrow was fine, but with pretty consistent jiggle, jiggle, jiggle turbulence.  I made the mistake of accidentally packing my sleeping pills and managed only a few hours of very poor quality sleep.  I will pay for this later in the day.  Our flight was supposed to land at 6:30 am, but arrived 45 minutes early, so we circled London for a while before being cleared to land.  It was nice arriving in Heathrow first thing in the day, there were no lines through passport control or anything.  We splurged on the Heathrow Express train into town instead of the Tube.  

We found a cheap luggage storage place near Waterloo station (inside a small ethnic grocery store) and then decided to walk toward the theatre district where we were meeting Delaney.

It was nice to see the scaffolding off of Big Ben.  It had rained, but was no longer raining.   It was hard to believe that the queue to view the Queen lying in state was stretched all the way down the river. No sign of that now. 

We found a Pret a Manger near Trafalgar Square (not hard since these seem to exist on every street corner), and sat down for a better-than-airline breakfast.  We found a window seat and people watched for a while, then decided to kill a couple of hours geocaching until Delaney's train arrived. 

Our first cache was directly on Trafalgar Square in a lamppost.  Very well hidden, but also easy to get to.

A few weeks ago, we picked up a travel bug while geocaching.  Meet Oscar.  His goal is to see as many trashcans and dumpsters as he can on his travels.  I'm trying to include a bin and a scenic view for each place we find a cache.  Fun!

Near the Royal Mews.  No horses in sight today.

Another cache hidden on the drain pipe near St. James Park.

Although the weather looked threatening several times, we didn't get rained on. 

Oscar in Green Park.

Oscar near Picadilly Circus

Another cool cache and log.  We collected a total of 6 before returning to Leicester Square and meeting Delaney. 

We went to see Mary Poppins in the theatre, then took the train to Bournemouth.

We arrived at 9:00 pm (3:00 am Wichita time) after flying 10 hours, sleeping four hours, and walking 5 miles around London.  Needless to say, I slept like a rock!