We're Off to Jolly Old England

We left Chilliwack Thursday afternoon and headed to YVR for our 6pm flight to London Heathrow. After check in we have a customary pint at the bar in the airport to kick start the holiday and by 615 we're on the plane and taking off. The flight lasted 9.5 hours during which time we managed a couple hours sleep and we landed at London Heathrow at 1130am UK time. When we first got off the plane we couldnt believe how hot it was, 27 degrees, as England is going through a heatwave right now phew was like landing somewhere tropical. We have to get to the other side of London to the place we are staying so after clearing British Immigration we collect our luggage and find Heathrow's Central bus station.Here we buy two bus tickets for $27 each and we take a greyhound type bus for 1.5 hours across to London Gatwick Airport which is where we fly from to Italy tomorrow. We get off the bus at Gatwick then wait for yet another another bus that takes us to our hotel. We check in and are in our room by 2:30 and by now we are pretty exhausted. We are meeting our friends Guy & Claire at 4 o'clock at a local pub that Glen discovered on the internet. The pub is a 15 minute walk from the hotel so we walk

 there through a field and an ancient old church yard. The pub is called Ye Olde Six Bells. Its a lovely place as its a 500 year old building with 6' high wood beam ceilings (even makes Glen feel tall in there teeheehee) loads of English ales on tap and a wonderful beer garden out back. Its really hot sat out in the sunny beer garden but the English ale was actually COLD so that kept us refreshed - Glen cant beleive the beer is actually cold. 2 pints of hand drawn Ale cost us 5 pounds so thats about $3.60 Canadian a pint - Hand drawn John Smiths cask ale mmmmmmm.
At 4 o'clock Guy & Claire arrive to meet us - its great to see them
and we give each other big hugs. Sitting having a few pints in the sun
in an English beer garden is so relaxing. It seems weird though that
we can just drop in from Canada and G&C come down on the train
and presto we are sat together having a pint - awesome !

After a couple of hours of catch up time and a few more beers we are getting hungry and Rhonda is craving

an indian meal. So we order a taxi and we ask the driver to take us to the main street in the local town.

He recommends an indian place and we go inside. The meal is so tasty - Rhonda says its the best indian food

she has ever tasted.

Indian food in England really is the best you will taste anywhere and we LOVE it. Had a great night with Guy & Claire but as we have to be up by 4am for our flight we said good bye and they left to catch their train. We headed back to our hotel and now it is 10.38pm. Gotta get some sleep now as we're up really early tomorrow for our flight to Milan in Northern Italy.

Oh yeah in order to order a taxi we had to force ourselves to go into another local pub so the

landlord could order the taxi for us - oh yeah just time for one last pint before the cab arrives teehee !