2022 A Romp Through Merry Old England: We are in England!!

Glorious Paddington Station—I love the beautiful, arching skylit roof
with decorated ribs. It was the first moment I felt I was Somewhere New...

It still seems like an astonishing miracle to me that people can climb into a large metal tube, spend hours flying through the air, and come out of the tube alive and in a place thousands of miles away from where they started. But that's what we did, climbing aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight Friday at 6:30ish in San Francisco, and less than ten hours later (the pilot saved time on the flight), emerging from the flight at London's Heathrow airport!

(Departing SFO photo courtesy of Nick, as part of his limo service)

The flight

The flight we were on was conveniently scheduled in the evening so that one could theoretically spend much of the flight time sleeping. Unfortunately, both of us had a very hard time getting comfortable enough to sleep, and did a lot of fidgeting all night long. Also, somehow the plane had a notably bad audio system; flight announcements were foggy and hard to hear, and though the flight offered 117 movies (!!), including recent ones I was interested in, in the end I found the sound (through provided headphones) too sketchy to make it worth it. One highlight of the flight though, was that we both happened to wake up around 1am (6.5 hours into the flight) and saw what we think was icy Greenland from the air!

Arrival process at Heathrow

The process for international arrivals was thankfully quite straightforward, if not very glamorous. By not glamorous, I mean that there was never any really cool "Welcome to London" sort of graphics, as we've encountered in other airports.

You got shunted into a large arrivals area, with arrivals from selected countries going through one line, and any others going through another line. The selected countries included the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the European Economic Area (EU + a few others), Japan, Singapore, and South Korea—check an official UK site for the exact list. The vast majority of arrivals were in the selected countries line. If you have a passport with the biometric symbol (circle with a line on each side), you can go through the eGates. At the eGate, you feed your passport into a reader and then the machine snaps a photo of you on the spot, and if your in-person photo matches your passport photo well enough, you pass through. Doug did not pass through—he thinks it was because he forgot to take off his glasses, thereby failing to match. He had to go through another line staffed with a real person, but it was pretty fast still.

Getting to Bath from Heathrow

Doug had psyched out that we could get to Bath by train (postponing the need for an expensive car rental until Tuesday), and had already gotten us digital tickets. We took a Heathrow Express to Paddington and then a Great Western Railway train to Bath (~1.5 hour ride). The process was very smooth, and the trains were great! Doug commented on how much better the train experience was than say, Caltrans. Not that Caltrans is bad, but the English train was newer and the ride was smoother and quieter.

The COVID/masking situation

As daughter Allison had told us, in general outdoor settings, most people don't mask anymore. We have found this to be true. There are still signs of COVID precautions (e.g. stand 6 ft. apart signage and spots on the ground), but overall people here seem pretty relaxed about COVID now.

Most passengers on the plane flight were still masked (maybe 60-75%?), and also I'd say more than half on the train were masked. But I was surprised that the Virgin Atlantic flight attendants weren't masked (because it's a high-contact role) and our hotel concierge wasn't masked (again a high-contact role). Hopefully this degree of relaxation is warranted... we'll know if we manage not to get sick on the trip!

On being in England

England is an easy country to visit, as foreign countries go. The language is the same, and there's a lot of cultural overlap, too. However one difference has caught our attention, besides the standard vocabulary differences (lifts instead of elevators, crisps instead of potato chips, a "stopping train" instead of a local). The announcements on the train were so cheery, perky, organized! It was hard to put a finger on the exact difference, as a lot of the content was the same: don't forget your belongings, the next stop is XXX, etc. Something about the tone just seemed different than in the US; I tried to record an announcement, but didn't think of it early enough to be successful.

On being in Bath

I will write a lot more about Bath tomorrow, but it is a very charming, touristy kind of town. We spent about five hours today just wandering around the town. What makes it so visually charming is that much of the central architecture dates back to the Georgian period (early 18th century) or even earlier, including a couple of beautiful churches, and an arched bridge. It's also famous as the locale for ancient Roman baths (hence the name Bath!).

Arriving on a Saturday, we found the place thick with tourists, mostly English tourists. We could tell because of listening for what languages you overhear. We rarely heard languages other than English, and much of the English we heard had a British accent. The central tourist area was lined wall-to-wall with shops; Doug said it made him think of the Stanford Shopping Center; we also thought of the touristy areas of Santa Cruz. Still, the natural beauty of the town shines through.

Here are just a few photos from Bath; more to come...

On the left is a bridge Bath is famous for.
On the right are kayakers preparing to take on the spillway waters.
We watched them start on the upper level and kayak down the artificial waterfalls.