Thanks in part to Conservative Party mismanagement of the UK transport sector for the last 13 years, things have gotten a bit fraught in the Old Country. And now, I get to spend a bit of extra time getting from Gatwick to my hotel on Saturday:
The Gatwick Express takes about 30 minutes from the airport to London Victoria Station. There is no other train option.
Instead, it looks like I can take a cab straight to my hotel for about £90, or a bus to bloody Heathrow and the Elizabeth Line for about £25. The former will take about an hour. The latter about 2 1/2.
So, I'm on vacation. No expense account. No schedule. Should I spend the extra $55? Sigh.
Between check-out and my departure for Vienna I have about 2 hours to kill. I've had my caffeine for the day already, so I'm not hanging out in Wenceslas Square occupying space at a cafe. Instead, I decamped to the park across the street from the train station:
This might actually be the best thing I've done all week. And whether because either Prague has lax leash laws or no one cares about them, several random dogs have said hi today.
I'll be back here soon.
I took a short (5.5 km) walk and ended with a Czech open-faced egg sandwich:
For the record, I didn't stop in the Sex Machines Museum, tempting as that sounded. Stopping ever few meters to take photos didn't help my time. Neither did the perfect weather.
I did stroll around the Czech Senate grounds, which felt a lot different than our Capitol Hill:
It almost felt as if our Senate sits in a building designed to dominate the city around it, while Czechia's sits in a walled garden. There's some profound political theory in there, I'm sure.
I just got from the curb to the lounge in 18 minutes. No kidding: my bag check line was empty, and so was the TSA Pre-Check queue. I should point out, no other queues were empty; in fact, it looked like the general security queue is long enough to gestate an elephant.
So, at least for the first hour of my vacation, things completely fail to suck.
Boarding pass from Chicago to Heathrow in app? Check.
Boarding pass from Heathrow to Prague in app? Check.
Packed? Uh...sure, once this laundry is done...
I'm serious: I couldn't have planned it better. Remember how I said I booked the early (4:50pm) flight because I wanted to fly on one of British Airways' brand-new 787-10 airplanes, and they swapped it out for one of they're old-ass 777s? Well, I woke up this morning to an email saying that the old-ass 777 won't actually make the trip after all, so they shoved me onto the next available flight on American.
After a not-so-quick call to American Airlines (them, because they issued the original ticket, and long, because British Airways screwed up the rebooking), they got me on the 9:15pm flight on a relatively-new Airbus 380. More to the point, instead of getting in at 6:30 am BST (12:30 am Chicago time), I'm now arriving at the much more humane hour of 11 am BST (5 am Chicago time).
That also puts me much closer to the bag-check time for my flight to Prague, and I'll still have enough time to get out of Heathrow for a bit. I hope.
If not, I have airline status with both American and BA, so the worst case is I cool my heels in the first-class lounge in Heathrow Terminal 3. Not ideal, but not like sitting in genpop with my luggage for 10 hours.
Updates as the situation warrants.
I haven't even left yet and already I've encountered three noteworthy irritations about the first 12 hours of my vacation, two of them involving British Airways and one involving Transport for London. (This will no doubt shock my readers in the UK.)
First, I chose an early-ish flight out of Chicago because when I booked it, BA planned to fly one of their brand-spanking-new 787-10 airplanes with their brand-spanking-new business class seats. But when I reconfirmed my seat yesterday (not my first time flying BA, you'll note), I learned that they will instead fly one of their old-ass 777s with their old-ass seats—and they put me in an aisle seat, which I did not want. I moved my seat without difficulty, but now I'm getting in to Heathrow at 6:35 am for no bloody reason. And because I used American Airlines miles for the trip, I may not be able to change to the later flight. (I don't know for sure because BA's customer service system is offline and won't be back up for a couple of hours.)
Second, they won't check my bag through to my final destination because my London to Prague flight is a separate booking. So my decision to take a 10-hour layover in London has hit a snag, unless I can somehow check my bag when I arrive. At 6:35 am. BA has helpfully suggested I can pay £209 to take an earlier flight, however. FFS.
But third, that might not even matter, because the Piccadilly Tube is shut down between Heathrow and Acton Town all weekend. If I do get my bag sorted, though, it'll be my chance to try out the new Elizabeth Line. At 7am. Which is 1am Chicago time.
So instead of flying to London on BA's newest airplane, leaving my bag at Heathrow for a few hours while I wander London on a beautiful late-spring morning, then coming back to Terminal 3 on the good ol' Piccadilly Line...I may spend several hours in the Terminal 5 Arrivals lounge waiting for my Prague flight to open for bag check.
Thank you for your assistance in these matters, British Airways. And TfL too! You guys rock!
The roofing project continues apace, taking advantage of an exceptionally lovely bit of weather this week. So, yay us, new roof and all. But I'm trying to work at home today—my last WFH day until June 8th, in fact—and the roofers have devised new ways to make it suck.
First came the generator. I don't know whatever reason they needed to put a large generator outside my office window, but there it sat for about 90 minutes. Closing my window helped the noise but not the temperature (remember, they relocated my air conditioners to put roof under them), and a generator makes a lot of noise that can go right through a wall.
The generator finally stopped around 10:30. Finally! I opened the window again and got back to it, until just a few minutes ago when I detected they had started spreading tar right outside my window. Fortunately, this appears to be the final stage of the actual roof replacement, so I expect my home office will be perfectly serviceable again in time for me to work downtown tomorrow and Thursday.
I'm also getting a headache from the VOCs in the tar.
This may be a good time to take Cassie for her lunchtime walk.
Cassie got about 4 hours of walks yesterday, plus about 9 additional hours of outdoor time. I got sunburned. So I didn't have any time to post, but I did have time to get side-eye from this girl:
That's Butters, a beagle whose every look is side-eye. It's quite a talent.
"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."—Lin Yutang
Today they got through about half of our flat roof which doubles as an upstairs patio. Imagine how much noise all this made:
Note that all the crap on the roof off to my left was at the other end of the balcony while they laid down the material directly under me. They timed it so they had the power saw going exactly when I had a Teams meeting for work. But they did got a lot of it done, and they should reconnect my A/C units just in time for next week's heat wave.