The Trip to England

Since the dollar was at a 26 year low against the British pound, Kristina and I decided to go to England and spend our money as inefficiently as possible.

The real reason for the trip was that Kristina's sister Jen is at Cambridge on a Gates Scholarship. Her time there is almost over, so we needed to visit before she was gone.

Along on the trip were two of Kristina's college friends, Marie and Jess.

Before we left, a rose we had on our deck started to bloom. I was worried it would do so while we were away and we'd miss it:
Rose

10 July 2007 - Tuesday

Kristina woke up incredibly early and went to work at 5am; I slept in a bit later. We packed up the car and left Ithaca around 10:30, driving to Jess's house near Ossining. We made pretty good time, despite a long detour around a road closure right after the Bear Mountain bridge.

We got to Jess's place, Marie showed up, and we were ready to go. Jess's extremely nice pastor drove us to JFK airport.

We made it in plenty of time. Actually, we had too much time. Due to storms on the East coast lots of flights were delayed, including ours. We had to move all over the terminal as our gate changed 3 times, and in the end the plane was delayed by 3 hours. We did keep a group of people around us amused by playing hearts. Our eventual flight had the unlikely designation of Delta 1.

Once we finally got on the plane and started taxiing, the pilot came on and said we were 35th in line for takeoff. Eventually we did take off, and It was nearly 1am before they served us supper. I tried (not very successfully) to sleep during the flight.

In the morning we looked out the window and saw land! We were flying over the south of England. It looked sunny and clear but by the time we landed at Gatwick it was cloudy and foggy (which is definitely more typical British weather).

We got through customs very efficiently, obtained some local currency, and headed for the trains. We lucked out, there was a promotion going on this summer that 3 or 4 could ride for the price of two, so essentially all of our train rides were half price. We caught the train to Kings Cross Thameslink in London (we'll be back here in a few days) and ran across the street to catch an express train to Cambridge.

Here is a blurry picture from inside our train in Kings Cross station (of Harry Potter fame):
Kings Cross
On to Day 1 in Cambridge
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