London

The trip from Paris to London was in a word difficult. We started early about 7.30 when the shuttle bus arrived and it took about 1.30 hours to get to the airport.
Then Trudi gets an anxiety attack at the departures lounge, crying she tells us that she does not want to fly to the UK. But through the miracle of modern drugs and the thought of missing the Harry Potter tour she calms her self down and we start the agonising journey through the French chaotic system of catching a plane.
First we had to use the electronic check in machines, as they do not check in with an airline representatives and of course the boarding pass would not print so I had to find some one to fix that, it took 15 minutes. Then we joined the que to get past customs with our travel bags because they do customs before you check in. They only had two windows open and some stinky women and her friend who was not even travelling hold things up because they don’t have the right paper work and then some prick from the end of the que walks past everyone to give the customs officers a gob full about the delay and then both the officers are arguing with this gump in French and no one is getting past. Then we had to join the que to check in the baggage and the stupid bitch (mole) at that counter tells us to board at gate 24 so again we line up to get the hand luggage scanned and get to the gate where they frisk you and take your wallet and belt only to find that we have been told the wrong gate number, it is gate 32 not 24 and us and every other non French person about 60 of us has to go out and find the right gate. I am pretty sure if you spoke French you were given the right boarding gate, any way as we passed her I called her a Fu???ing Idiot. Which made me feel a bit better. Because the electronic check in did not print on our boarding pass which gate, it was confusing to check, anyway we now find the right gate do the strip body search routine and get to the waiting area where Trudi needs to pee and offcourse no toilets in this area. The plane starts to board like 1 minute after we get to the lounge and I said for Trudi to go ahead and pee on the plane. So the kids and I walk down the gangway a few minutes after Trudi to find her sitting in a bus that is going to take us to the plane. I thought something funny was happening as they wanted us to board but there was no plane. It was funny seeing the expressions of all the passengers when they saw they had to get on a bus.
So now we are settled on the plane and are flying from Paris 3o minutes late, the captain mentions that it will be a 40 minute flight and the cabin crew start drink service which is cool because it is now close to midday and we have not had anything to drink or eat because it was so hard to get through the French system. Now it starts to get very turbulent and the plane rocks from side to side and the cabin crew stop serving, our first piece of luck because it was everyone behind us who missed out.
The weather in London was bad and they closed the airport for departures so we first have to fly a holding pattern for 20 minutes circling the airport and when we finally land we have to wait on the tarmac because as no planes were departing there was no terminal space for us to dock. We wait for 40 minutes on the ground before we get to disembark. We organise a shuttle to drive us to the hotel, our driver is a nice guy named Herbert and we get out towards the expressway to find gridlock. The weather has created chaos and flooding on the motorway and has brought traffic to a crawl. Apparently a month of rain fell in a few hours so our 40-minute journey to the hotel takes just over two hours.
We finally to get to the Hotel and we are happy to have arrived and Peobe our neighbours, Bill and Belinda’s daughter who is living here with her friend Steven calls up and happens to be close so we arrange to have drinks in a pub next to the Hotel named the Sherlock Holmes.
It is all good now; we have had some food, a few beers and seen some friendly faces.