We’re back in Seattle! (Well, Kent. It’s close to Seattle. Greater Seattle metropolitan area.)
Day 24 (part 2): London to Seattle
Finally, we’re at the end. We flew out of Heathrow airport, flying home via British Airways in their Premium Economy class. It’s really nice! Not business/first class nice, of course, but a definite step up from coach. Shorter domestic flights well likely stick with standard coach class, but for anything long-haul, it’s worth the extra money.
Unfortunately, even with the extra leg room and all, I still can’t actually sleep on planes, so it was a long ten hours. Watched The Mandalorean and Grogu, which was a perfectly serviceable extra-long episode of the series, but I’m glad I wasn’t tempted to pay to see it in the theater. I don’t feel like I lost anything by watching it on the back of an airline seat. Also watched Ready Player One, which was entertaining fluff; even having read the book and knowing how pop-culture dependent it is, mostly I was impressed at how many characters, items, and visuals they got permission to include, and I’m sure I only caught a small fraction, as I was watching a fairly highly compressed version (judging by how muddy it got during quick action scenes) on an airplane seat console. And I read some more of the Discworld book I’m currently reading, Small Gods.
Eventually, the plane landed, we breezed through incoming customs, caught a Lyft, and we are home again! It’s been a great trip, but after three and a half weeks, we’re so happy to be sleeping in our own beds again.
Many more photos to come over the coming weeks (or months) as I get through processing them all!
Random Travel Thoughts
And finally, a few random thoughts and comments that have come up while we’ve been traveling but didn’t make it into the earlier posts:
-
Euro convenience food is better than ours, with more variety and much better quality. This may well be a side effect of so much of Europe’s grocery/shopping norms operating on a “shop regularly for a day to a few days at a time” cadence rather than the U.S.-ian “shop every week or two unless you do monthly/semi-monthly Costco runs” cadence; even their “convenience” stores are closer to just being small grocery stores, with a wider range of choices. It made grabbing easy in-hotel dinners and breakfasts very easy, and was much more affordable than if we’d gone to restaurants for every meal.
-
Without planning it this way, we travelled in inverse likelihood of encountering cigarette smoke. Germany (Frankfurt and Berlin) was smoke everywhere (walking through the Berlin zoo, with ashtrays on all the garbage cans, parents calmly puffing on cigarettes while shepherding children around, and some smaller semi-enclosed viewing areas that we simply couldn’t go into because of the stench was a truly bizarre experience), Amsterdam almost as bad, Brussels a bit less. Paris was much less smokey than we expected; it was almost at US/UK levels. The UK is more like the US, where cigarettes are around on the streets and in some public areas, but generally briefly and/or can be avoided in most cases, and many large public spaces and parks are designated no-smoking areas.
-
Pot smoke was nonexistent in Germany, which was nice. Some in Amsterdam, which was expected, it wasn’t as prevalent as we thought it might be. I don’t remember encountering any in Paris or Berlin, and I’m not sure about Brussels. (As with cigarettes, I don’t particularly care if people smoke pot or otherwise use marijuana, I just really don’t like the smell of the smoke and prefer it when people don’t force me to unwillingly participate in their indulgences.)
-
US tow trucks assume enough space to maneuver the car and tow truck around to tow or winch the car up onto a flatbed. Euro tow trucks assume they’ll need a crane to hoist the car onto the flatbed.
-
There have been so few pickups, SUVs and the like, etc. Virtually nonexistent for most of the trip; all vehicles were small, reasonable cars or work vans. Have spotted a few in London, but they’re still in the minority. It’s been so nice to spend three weeks without giant SUVs and status-symbol pickup trucks dominating the roads. And while we did see Teslas, they weren’t as numerous as they are in Seattle (or were in San Francisco), and thanks to the EU/UK’s stricter safety regulations, not a single Cybertruck!
-
Germany and London had the best train/tram transit. Amsterdam’s trams are good but they need more cars; the trams were always overcrowded (but we did like the rear-of-train secondary person).
-
Though the UK is a walk-on-the-left country, London has so many tourists from walk-on-the-right countries that the end result is that all pedestrian spaces are effectively a chaotic free for all, with enough inability to predict where anyone will be, is going to be, or which direction they’ll be coming from at any moment to make Heisenberg himself giddy. Escalators, on the other hand, are a no-nonsense hard line: stand to the right, walk on the left, violators will be shoved.