First day in town:

DSC00012
Originally uploaded by woden325.

After the ghastly travel day yesterday, it was decided that today should be a free day, and also an orientation day for those
in the group that had never visited London before. After getting our travelcards and making sure everyone was flush with cash,
we took the tube to Kings Cross station. There's a significant number of Harry Potter geeks in the class, myself
included, so we went to see Platform 9¾. It's a brick archway with a luggage trolley protruding out of the wall. Clever and a
bit silly, which strikes me as the best way to do this.

Afterwards, we proceeded to Trafalgar Square, which was something of a disappointment. Nelson's Column is being cleaned or
renovated or somesuch, and the column is covered with scaffolding. They added insult to injury by wrapping the scaffolding
with goofy pictures of it underwater being menaced by giant car-eating squid.

Next, we walked along Whitehall, stopping at the Horse Guards Parade so people could take pictures next to the horses, then
down past 10 Downing Street, and finally to Parliament Square.

There, the group split up, the larger portion going in to Westminster Abbey, while four of us headed for the Imperial War Museum. We stopped at a nice little pub called The Three Stags for lunch. My chicken sandwich and a pint of "Old Speckled Hen" went down a treat. The Museum had some fine displays and I quite enjoyed it.
More pictures are up at my Flickr account.
Later tonight: The Ceremony of the Keys at The Tower of London.

Finally!

I have finally made it to England.
We were delayed 4 hours by mechanical and weather delays at our originating airport, which demolished our trip plan. We missed our connecting flight, and there was some concern whether we would be able to get another flight for 23 people from O'Hare to Heathrow.
Somehow, American Airlines was able to accommodate us. Why they had 23 empty seats was beyond us. Ken and I speculated that the rest of the plane was filled with a leper's convention or something.
Anyhow, the AA flight did not leave ORD until 910am the next morning, so we got to spend a lovely evening in the terminal.
First we had to transfer from one terminal to another, which in any normal airport would be a simple matter of catching a subway or a bus, but no, not in Chicago. We found a shuttle bus, but he didn't want to take all of us, and there was no later bus. Finally he agreed to take us if we all could find a seat. 23 Strangers sitting on each other's laps is a great way to build camaraderie.
Then we got to the gate for our AA flight, which was about 900 miles from the shuttle stop. There's no way we would have made the journey as scheduled on our original itinerary. Also, for reasons best known to Mayor Daley, there were no shops open at all. Nor were there any vending machines to get a snack or water. This was another great camaraderie building exercise, as we took it in turns to watch luggage and keep an eye on those crazy enough to sleep on the floor.
Eventually 5:30am rolled around, and we were able to get food, then we had to figure out how to get on the flight. We didn't have boarding passes, and the airline was spectacularly unhelpful on that front. A few of us got booked piecemeal, but the staff wasn't overly friendly about it, plus they helped start a rumor that the flight was seriously overbooked. This lead to a mad rush to get boarding passes, which was met with admirable stonewalling.
Meanwhile, Jan, Ken, and I burned up a zillion minutes on my phone card trying to get hold of our tour organizer to inform him of the delay. He never answered. Fortunately, the bus company leapt to the rescue. They arranged a rescue bus, and got hold of Maria, the tour guide who was to meet our flight, and got her to the airport at the correct time.
We had a very uneventful, if really long, flight to London. Smooth as glass right up until about 1000 feet from landing at LHR. That was bumpy, and the pilot must have caught a cross-ways gust of wind, because we swerved all over the runway for a few minutes. Very exciting stuff.
We cleared passport control in a breeze, and miraculously, all our bags made it to England with us. Nobody got lost, or held up in Customs and we were able to get to our hotel.
It looks, as Bryan put it, like it'd be more at home in East Berlin, but it's clean and efficient, unlike anything the East German Government ever built.
More to come, but now it's breakfast time.
P.S. God bless whoever thought up the idea of Free wi-fi. I'm lobby-blogging and loving it.

Lousy Airports

I'm blogging from the airport. Our flight to Chicago has been delayed, which has thrown everything else into chaos. We've missed our connecting flight to London, damn it.
Now, we get to have a really fun layover at O'Hare. Instead of leaving at 9pm from Chicago, we're flying at 9AM, which means spending the night in the terminal. Goody.

Hopefully, he said, the next post will be from England.

The Email

Oh, yeah. I forgot that I was going to add an email.
willtravelblog --AT-- gmail -- DOT -- com
If it weren't for the verminous spammers of the world, that'd be a link.

May not fit in overhead bin.

PHL airport 3
Originally uploaded by DrBrian.

The packing is packed. Every trip I swear I'm going to pack lighter, and every trip I pack just about every movable object in the house. Hopefully, United Airlines is just kidding about that carry-on size limit.
Anyhow, I'm ready to go. The next post will hopefully be from "an island nation known for its exotic cuisine."

Presentation done, now for the tricky bit.

The presentation went adequately. I forgot my password for the stupid university network, so I couldn't wow my classmates with my pictures. Oh well.
Anyway, it's time to really concentrate on the packing. And the laundry. And making sure that I have copies of all the paperwork that I'll need. Etc. Etc.

Still Working on the Presentation

Found quite an interesting site while I was working on my presentation, and thought I'd pass it on: TudorHistory.Org.
The author seems to really know her stuff, and there's a wealth of pictures and other information in there. I highly recommend it.

Preparing for my Presentation

Whitby3
Originally uploaded by woden325.

The class I'm taking is called Great Women of Shakespeare's England, and in the run-up to the trip, each student has to make a presentation. In the presentation, the student must discuss one of the aforementioned great women, and also discuss one of the destinations.
The woman I chose was Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII. I'll have more to say about Henry and Catherine later.
The location I chose was Whitby Abbey, which is one of my favorite places in the world.
I took the picture you see here on my previous trip there in July, 2000. You can see the full set here.
Whitby abbey was founded as a mixed abbey well back in the 7^th century by St. Hilda. It was the scene of the Synod of Whitby in 664, when the Northumbrian King, Oswy, ordered the church to celebrate Easter according to the Roman calendar, rather than the Celtic one. The current building is of later construction, mostly 14^th century. It was ruined when Henry VIII ordered the suppression of the monasteries after his break with Rome. Why did Henry break with Rome, you may ask? So he could divorce Catherine of Aragon.
So Whitby bears witness to both the Roman Catholic origins of the the English church, as well as its transformation to the Protestant Church of England today.

Oh, and another thing.

Administrative note for my legion of readers. Yes, all three of you.
I'm not planning on turning on comments for the blog. Most blogs seem to have relentless comment-spam problems. This requires moderation by me, or the use of automated things like Captcha scripts, and I just can't be bothered.
If I remember, I'll set up a Gmail account and put that on here later.

Pre-Travel Boredom

I haven't posted much because not much is happening. Now that the spring semester is over, I'm trying to get squared away for the trip.
The most interesting thing I've done is to stock up on new guide books.
I'm a big fan of the Michelin Green Guides for good all-round sight-seeing and trip planning, so I got the new Great Britain Guide along with the Red Guide, three new road atlases, and the Lonely Planet: Great Britain. With all that, I think I'm moderately well prepared for the trip. At least as far as reading and planning go.
Next step: figure out how to pack lighter.

Ooh, first posting.

So, this is blogging. It's all very 21^st century, isn't it?
Anyhow, I'm going to be departing from my super-secret lair to visit England and Scotland for a History class at my university. One of the requirements of the class is that each of the students keep a travel journal. On previous trips, I kept the journal in the traditional manner (i.e. I jotted stuff down a week later, and hoped that I got the details somewhat correct.), but on this trip I thought I'd be all high-tech about it.
So, I'll be taking the digital camera and my ThinkPad along this time, and posting the journal entries and my pictures as I go. Hopefully, I'll be able to connect to the interweb regularly; otherwise I'll be jotting things down a couple of weeks later, and hoping I got the details somewhat correct.