Sunday, April 27, 2014

London, through a jet lagged haze.

Well, this may not work. Apparently taking one step forward technologically makes me slide a couple of steps back.  I can't seem to upload photos from my iPad to this blog platform and the iPad and iPhone are all I've got.

What I can do, for the moment at least, is to point you to my Instagram feed (oh my god, can you hear what I'm saying?  At least I don't tweet!).  Just download the app or go to www.instagram.com and search for username shellioreck. Is it worth the trouble? I don't know, although I hope so. Taking pictures with a smartphone rather than a camera is a different animal.

So back to the real world.  A flight from SFO to London brought us to our hotel too early for the room to be ready but they were super nice and let us use another room to rest and shower.  How cool is that?  We staggered through the day, slept through the afternoon, met some friends for a drink in the evening and slept off and on through the night. It felt like a bit of a marathon with that awful sort of nauseous exhaustion that jet lag brings, at least to me.

Poor Gene is the poster boy for the worst jet lag ever, each time.  For him it lasts the full eight or nine days, one for each time zone he's passed through.  He's very familiar with the sounds of the night in many major cities as 3:00 a.m. is when he's most awake.  And this morning he was awake to greet the dawn of his birthday.  (Insert a whispered version of Happy Birthday).

The birthday boy staggered down to breakfast at about 11 but managed to stay awake and active through a walk down Whitehall and along the river to the Tate Britain, a museum we've never before visited. A large and very impressive collection of British art was just right for us today.

Tomorrow, on to Bath.  The town, folks, the town!! We've been showering.


2 comments:

Susan said...

Two years ago we visited London, taking a couple of days for a trip to Bath. we stopped at Stonehenge (where I read in last week's New Yorker that there is an entirely new, updated visitors' center and display), and Salisbury Cathedral -- a really cool place to stop. If you do, ask about the water table underneath the church floor. And while in Bath, Do Not Miss the actual Roman Baths -- the true highlight of the trip. Enjoy! (sign me slightly green with envy....)

Shelli said...

Susan, I just read that article not an hour ago! We won't have time for Stonehenge but we were lucky enough to go there 40 years ago, when you could walk among and even sit on the fallen stones.

Forecast for our time in Bath: thunderstorms! What would Jane Austen do?