Hi Ho!

For 45 minutes we searched the area for a Kensington Cabs driver who was supposed to meet us with a name sign. Unable to find him, we finally gave up and took a cab to the apartment I’d arranged through a private owner months before in the Chelsea-Kensington area (near Holland Park). The drive from LHR to Kensington took nearly an hour along jarring, loud, pollution-filled roadways, further fraying our jet-lagged nerves which are used to quiet, country living.

NOTE: It is not worth taking a cab due to the noise, the time and the cost. Our cost, 50-pounds (plus a 5 pound tip), was equivalent to $115 (sept. 5, 2007). The tube to Waterloo, changing for Kensington High Street or Kensington Olympia, might have costs a total of $35 and gotten us close to the apartment in less than 30 minutes, without the traffic noise, diesel fumes and aggravation. With only one carry-on rolling bag each (plus a messanger bag or day pack), we didn’t realize how easy — and not confusing — it would have been to take the tube.

NOTE: Travel light! We hear this admonition repeatedly and yet some people just don’t get it. In a separate article I’ll elaborate with specifics on exactly what to pack in one bag for a 2-week trip, and dress really well. Meanwhile, if you’re one of those people who needs a sherpa to schlep your bags, I urge to remain open to the idea of carry-on-only travel.

Note: Kensington Cabs’ fee of 65 pounds was charged by our landlord who arranged it. The company claimed their driver was there and did not find us. However, acting professionally, they gave us credit and we used it on our last day in London for a ride from the flat to Waterloo Station to catch the Eurostar

We arrived at the apartment half a block north of Kensington High Street on Holland Road, both busy thoroughfares. The exterior of the Georgian townhouse was shabby and garbage littered the street. Upon entering the hallway we found dirty walls, threadbare carpet and a narrow winding staircase up which we slogged our bags four floors. We had seen photos of the flat on line and it looked charming. “Maybe it’s just the public space that’s less-than-wonderful,” Jan offered optimistically, “and the flat will be great.”

Specific travel tips and advise are found under “Notes” below.

I understand why people book a tour or let a travel agent plan their itinerary: it’s easier and saves time, brain damage and, often, money.  But I am not one of those people. I love the research and challenge of travel planning and I even became a travel agent to take advantage of discounts and perks, which have come in handy. (if you want to do that too, see my website, www.AyshaGriffin.com, ). However, despite the best-laid plans, I am always surprised when they work, and disappointed when they don’t.

This just-completed 2-week trip began in November 2006 when United Airlines Mileage Plus program sent me an email saying that if I did not use my 110,000 miles by the end of 2007, they would expire. Where would you like to go? I asked David, my life-partner who has declared he will travel only “for the architecture.” England, he replied. That’s fine, I said, but we can’t go to England without inviting Jan (David’s sister and a director of Shakepearean young people’s theatre) and Richard (her master-woodworker husband), who live in New Hampshire and have never been “across the pond.” You’re right, David said, they have to come with us.

Planning travel for one couple is complicated by trying to accommodate both people’s interests, but the logistics of planning for two couples is more than double the complication: all lodging must have two separate bedrooms and baths, all four people’s interests and needs must be considered, and traveling from different starting points to an overseas destination must be coordinated.

For at least six months I planned this, first with the full two weeks in England and then, after reports in July of major floods in Oxfordshire and Gloustershire, I reconfigured the trip — cancelling all four different B&Bs and a week-long car rental from Oxford to Heathrow Airport (LHR) — with 4 days in London and the remainder in France. However, we would have to make our way back to London to fly out of LHR for our return tickets.

Note: airfares could not be changed without paying fees almost equal to the fare itself; that was partially due to my having booked the Boston-London fares via cheaptickets.com which used two different carriers (one for each direction) and has its own fees for changes, in addition to the airlines. My Mileage Plus miles could have been changed but there was no longer availability on the dates I wanted.

Jan and Richard’s Virgin Air flight from Boston to LHR (which they said was exceptionally comfortable and service-oriented, in coach class) arrived on time and David’s and my United flight (ABQ to Chicago’s ORD to LHR) landed 45 minutes after, as scheduled. While standing in a snaking line for an hour to show our passports, I called Jan from my international cell phone to hers — both worked! A miracle. And we rendezvoused, as planned, in front of the Virgin Courtesy Counter. Another miracle!

Note: My international cell phone, purchased via cheaptickets.com, proved to be an excellent deal. The phone company, www.ekit.com, charged $29 for the phone, provided a toll-free number for friends to use from the states, free minutes, easily rechargable time, incoming calls from the states at just 45-cents per minute and other reasonable fees, a British cell number and a Simms card-enable phone to keep and use again when traveling overseas.

Note: If you can fly into Gatwick, Manchester or any other airport rather than Heathrow, I am told you will have a better experience.

article continued in next posting.

I awake in a medieval abbey of massive gray-rock walls and delicate stone arches. Panic seeps into my thoughts as I realize nature’s calling and I don’t know where the  bathroom is. Where is it? I look around, slowly recognizing the shapes of furniture in the room, the comfortable feel of my own bed, in my own house in Santa Fe. The abbey of Le Mont Saint-Michel, started in the 8th century, without toilets, is 5,000 miles away and five days ago, on the edge of Normandy, on the edge of the earth and time. And yet, for those moments — perhaps in whole previous life times (who can say how long dreams last?) — I was there, not here.

Although my body is safely home, two intense weeks in London, Paris and points west in France fill my dreams with vivid imagery, as if I were beamed back home in a StarTrek transporter, and not all of me re-materialized. Two weeks, minus a day (or two) for the dizzying jet-lag-buzz to subside, leaves 13 days in which to accomplish an ambitious list of “must do’s.”

In the doing, being present with each moment is not only required but demanded. Which “tube” or “metro” to what station? Which direction to the museum and, once you see it, why is the entrance three long blocks away? What restaurant and what should you order (especially when it’s in a language you don’t know)? Shoot, we walked all the way over here (feet throbbing) to find the entire Marais District closed today for Rosh Hashanah!

Constant movement and the inevitable not-knowing of being in a place for the first time (or the first time in decades) — no matter how much you research or plan in advance — forces all your senses to take in everything, consciously and unconsciously, whether you want to or not. The experience is like air, involuntarily inhaled, and more keeps coming in with each next place, next vista, next conversation, next decision, next meal, breaking only for deep sleep to begin again the next morning. It is all new and exciting and you want to breath it all in as fully as you can. The days count down and you must keep going — so much to see and do!

I jotted a few notes in my journal and checked email a few times, but in France the French keyboards at the cybercafe were so different that a quick note took 30 minutes and several euros and the frustration wasn’t worth the effort. I bought a dozen postcards, which are still in a bag. I didn’t want to tear myself away from the moment to reach across the world for a blithe hello. I’d be back in a short fortnight and I’d reminisce then.

After being home five days, I am beginning to exhale, to let out the stories, remember details, want to write and share them. I am slowly integrating this reality with the memories of that. Unlike previous trips, often as varied and crammed, this one is reverberating in technicolor dreams and part of me is still inhaling in France.

Like clockwork, or airline schedules that are actually kept we — Jan and Richard flying from Boston, and David and I from Albuquerque, actually met up Thursday morning in front of Heathrow Airport’s Virgin Atlantic Courtesy Counter as planned. A miracle.

After that, the miracles required for plans to “come off without a hitch” did not show up…like the mini-cab driver who was supposed to meet us, name sign in hand, and, after 45 minutes asking black-suited men holding signs with other people’s names, “Are you with Kensington Cabs?”, we took a taxi (50 pounds). The unrelenting roar of the city and poisonous smell of traffic congestion from the airport to the flat at 21 Holland Road (Chelsea) only added to our addled sleepless, jet-lagged brains.

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The day has finally arrived to head to London for 4 days, then on to Paris for 5 and 3 days driving the countryside in the west of France. Although I am a compulsive travel planner and love to spend hours (days, weeks!) researching online, I think perhaps I overdid it for this mere 2 week trip. The stack of papers, confirmations for apartment rentals, train and plan transfers, rental cars, hotels, is inches thick and I’m carrying the hefty folder as if I were going to a business meeting, not on vacation.

I wonder about the simplicity of a tour, with all the details of rooms and transport already decided. Well, we shall see, and I will update you along the way.

Tomorrow morning, David and I are set to meet up at Heathrow at 9:00 — at the Virgin Courtesy Desk — with his sister and brother-in-law, flying from Boston as we make the long trip from Albuquerque. Is it possible?

As the Desiderata says, “enjoy your accomplishments as wll as your plans.” More from London…

From the first time I stuck out my thumb at age 14 headed north on the Merritt Parkway out of New York City and found my way seamlessly, after numerous rides, to a teacher’s farmhouse in Northern Vermont, I held a cocky pride in my “great sense of direction.” It took 38 years and several circumnavigations of the globe to have this pretense shot to hell by a short drive from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Marin County.

I was familiar with the Bay Area. In 1999 I spent a month living on the forested grounds of the Presidio, at the northwest tip of San Francisco, to take an interesting but pretentiously titled course accredited by Goddard College: “Sustainable Ethical Enterprise Design.” Five years earlier I spent more than a year in Sonoma, just an hour’s drive north of the Golden Gate, managing a 200-acre conference center ranch where, under wide-limbed grandfather oaks, amid colorful organic gardens and in mission-style cottages, I welcomed spiritual warriors and seekers. So I thought I knew my way around when I arrived at SFO and rented a silver-colored PT Cruiser to drive to Book Passage in Corte Madera, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, for a four-day Travel Writer’s Conference. No problem.

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