I woke up early Wednesday, after a very poor night's sleep, to another San Franciso sunrise, my last for two months, and it was a beauty.

By 6.40, I was picked up by the airport limo I'd treated myself to. The driver was an ex-patriate Brit, of all things. He rushed me to the airport in fine time, but only quickly enough to find that the flight would be late departing due to a weather incident in Chicago. It was the first of many delays. So I wandered the departure lounge, trying to supress my business travel instincts of spending money.

We departed almost an hour late, and were delayed still further by a nasty storm near Chicago. While we descended through the gloom and murk, I saw at least two lightening flashes. But, as you can see, I lived to tell the tale :) I was out of the plane with just enough time before my London flight to wolf down some surprisingly decent sushi and regrettably forgo a Starbucks (this with the hope that I'll actually sleep on the plane!)

Unpromising weather "incident" in Chicago

The rain streaming across the window panes in the terminal seemed like a premonition of English weather. I watched as the time for our flight kept getting set further and further back. Sigh. This is the part of travel I hate.

Waiting, and waiting, and waiting ...

Eventually, somehow, I made it to my comfy business-class seat and watched the common people stream past me to cattle class. :) And we were airborne - on our way to London, England (as Americans love to say).

I rarely sleep on airplanes, but I thought I'd try to go whole hog this time, and see if I could do it. So I'd avoided coffee, and, after the dinner and movie on the flight, I put those little American Airlines oversocks on, the eye mask, and noise-deadening headphones, popped a melatonin, and reclined all the way and closed my eyes. Two hours later, my eyes were still gamely closed, but I hadn't slept a wink. It just wasn't meant to be.

A couple more hours, and it was breakfast time, and yet more calories. As we neared London, a computerized map showed our location, with the time and distance until touchdown. Suddenly an extra 45 minutes was tacked onto the arrival time - yet more delays! Ugh, it's always the last hour of a long flight which drags the most. The one consolation in our late arrival was that we'd be getting in at a civilized hour, rather than the usual gloomy six a.m.

Once on the tarmac, things couldn't have been easier - I was first off the airplane, breezed through passport control, didn't even register a sniff at customs, and I was rattling along the new high-speed rail track to Paddington less than twenty minutes after touchdown. The lush green swards and foliage, low grey skies, church spires, the rain reflecting off brick walls and slate roofs with sad, dilapidated chimneys, the tracks infested with grafitti and weeds - all of it seemed so intimately familiar that I felt immediately repatriated, despite my long absence.

Catching a taxi at Paddington Station looked like a nightmare - long, long queues, through which I had to struggle with my three bags. I was saved by the taxi- sharing system, wherein both me and all my baggage were squeezed into a traditional London cab on top of four business men. My face almost pressed against the window, I felt a woosh of nostalgia as the bulky cab sped through the narrow London streets. I was amazed by the jay-walking - I guess I've been tamed by American customs. Here, people step out almost right in front of oncoming traffic in the middle of the block, and neither pedestrian nor driver bat an eyelid as both miss each other by inches.

My hotel is in a green Bloomsbury crescent - I'd chosen it because I knew the neighborhood very well: I lived in the same crescent for two and a half years when I was in college, in one of the dorms or "halls of residences" across the street. The hotel staff seemed ever so slightly dotty, in that quaint English way, and my room was a tiny little cubby right on the crescent. I could poke my head out the window and look right up the crescent.

View up the crescent from my hotel window

Today was a day for getting acclimatized, not for tourizing. I didn't feel too bad at first, despite the jet-lag and lack of sleep, and I walked around a bit, refamiliarizing myself with Bloomsbury, and going to the train station to get seat reservations for later on in my trip. By mid-afternoon, though, I was flagging, feeling not so much tired, as like a battered, torn piece of soggy, dark lettuce. So I bought some cheese and cold-cuts, and a pre-packaged salad at Safeways, intending to take it back to my hotel room to eat. Here is where I began to realize I'm more of a stranger here than I thought. When I asked the guy at the deli counter at Safeways for a plastic fork, he looked at me funnily, and said they didn't have any. So I stopped by an organic health-food store on the way back, and asked them if I could have one of their plastic forks. The store clerk had to ask her manager for permission, and both of them looked at me as if they were thinking "crazy Americans!"

After my hotel-room picnic, I finally took a long sleep and woke up mid-evening. The gloom had gone from the sky and a low sun was filtering through the green leaves in the crescent. I took a tired, groggy walk around Russel Square, grabbing a final dose of daylight in the hope of resetting my internal clock so that I won't feel so jet-lagged tomorrow. It was cooler than I'd expected - I guess I was the only one wearing shorts! But it was a fine evening, the kind of sunny, green London evenings I'd been looking forward to.

Late evening sun in Russel Square