Donnie was attached to the USS Enterprise in Norfolk, Virginia, for the last 18 months. In the Navy's bureaucratic mind, this means that we "live" in Norfolk, and therefore must fly to London from Norfolk. We loaded (stuffed / packed /crammed) the van with our 18 bags, a coffee maker, and various other objects that somehow missed the moving truck (like Donnie's homemade neck for his cigar box guitar project) and headed north.
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| Goodbye Florida! |
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| Our freshly painted, sunny Florida home. |
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| Hotel pool in Virginia. |
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| Killing time at the mall posing as Old Navy models. |
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| Clearance sale! 3 kids for the price of 1! |
We flew from Virginia to New Jersey in a small turboprop aircraft. It was the first airplane flight for Sarah and Eli, and Ezra's first since he was a year old. They were great travelers, and only freaked out for a small part of take-off (Eli). We had a beautiful view of New York City and the Statue of Liberty as we landed in New Jersey; our layover was a 15 minute sprint to the gate for our London flight.
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| Getting ready to board a tiny plane! |
The flight from New Jersey to Heathrow was uneventful, except for the fact that the kids only slept about 2 hours of it. They were uninterested in the personal in-seat media centers (with multiple kids' movies), wanting only to climb on mom and eat from the enormous bag of food that we brought on board. The airline food was even more disgusting that I remember. After landing, we spent an hour getting through immigration, then another hour arranging transport to our hotel.
With our 6 people and multiple bags we took a van plus a cab to the airport Marriott we had booked for our first few nights in town. We knew we would be exhausted, and just wanted somewhere easy to sleep off the jet lag. After being dropped off (and unloading our pile of belongings) we discovered that we had arrived at the wrong airport Marriott! Fortunately the concierge found us an even larger van that was able to transport us to the right one, a few miles down the road.
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| In the cab heading to the right hotel. |
Booking a single room or suite for 6 people is near impossible in this country, but we had managed to find a suite with a king size bed and 2 pullout couches. We slept for 20 of the next 30 hours, waking only to eat. After the last 2 months of prepping and traveling, we were finally able to rest!
