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Friday, July 9, 2004
Lightness at Noon 
| | It's 3:17am on the West Coast, and 11:17am here in London, where I've finally arrived in my hotel room. It is almosts exactly 24 hours since I departed Santa Barbara, driving 350 miles to San Francisco in a bright yellow rented Mustang convertible (not recommended), to catch a 9-hour flight to London. |
| | In fact, it took less time to drive from SBA to SFO than to get from the arrival gate at LHR to my hotel room in London's NW8 (and, given the £54 taxi fare, less expensive). By one guess there were more than 2000 people in the passport control queue at Heathrow, which oozed past the control desks at a Soviet pace. I counted at least 200 in the taxi queue, as taxis arrived and departed at the rate of one every five minutes. When I got to the hotel, at 9:30am — 2.5 hours after the plane arrived at Heathrow, the lady at the reception desk told me, without mercy, that check-in time would be 2pm, and that I was welcome to hang out in the bar or the lobby, both already crowded with other weary travellers. An hour and a half later, after I asked her if there was a way around the extremely expensive lobby Wi-Fi ("£4.95 for the first 15 minutes including VAT, £0.31 for each additional minute, including VAT", which I refused to pay) a different person at the reception desk took pity on me, intervened, and got me this room. Perhaps he was moved by the fact that I not only looked like hell, but fell asleep on my feet while standing at the counter. |
| | The good news: as usual, I brought nice weather with me. It's sunny here, after days of rain and gloom. After I get a nap, I'll put up a picture. |
| | [Later...] Okay, there it is. Hope it's not too huge. I shot it out a window of a United 747, Big Ben says (in an enlargement), at 6:49am. The early light on the city was gorgeous. |
| | It was a lucky shot, since my seat was just behind the wing, and was a rare window seat without a window (which pissed me off enormously when I got on the plane discovered that fact). To get the shot I wedged the camera into the narrow space between the near edge of the window in front of my row, and the back of the seat in front of me, which had reclined in front of that window for most of the trip, but had retured to the upright position for landing. Thanks to the Nikon's little flip-out viewer, I could see the shot without using the eyepiece. |
| | By the way, I spoke too soon about the weather. I'm IMing with Euan, and it's raining at his place while thunder and lightning are happening here. O well. |
Back across the pond
| | Hope to see some of ya'll over there. |
Herding geeks
Wholly fucking shirt
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