Wednesday, October 1, 2014
The room was quite chilly and the bed very hard last night. In addition being a block from Victoria Station, it seemed that we could feel the clack clack of trains coming or going about every 15 minutes. In all, it did not make for a good night’s sleep even though we both worked at it long and hard. Clay woke me with the bathroom light at 2:58am. I don’t know if he was getting up then or not, but I went ahead and got up since I was awake. I had a cup of instant coffee that was provided in the room and showered and washed my hair, got dressed and we finished packing up. We left the room about 4am. We went down to the lobby and turned in the keycard and checked out.
We walked straight to Victoria Station and through the open
and unmanned turnstiles to the Gatwick Express turnstiles and boarded the
train. I was worried because I had read that the tickets needed to be validated
somehow. I took the tickets and went to the main turnstiles at the Underground
entrance to Victoria Station where the turnstiles were working, manned and with a line
of passengers on the other side. I told the guy working there where we had
entered and how and he was surprised. I asked him if he could scan the tickets
now and he said no, just show them to whoever is working the turnstiles at the
Gatwick end. Well, the turnstiles at Gatwick were open and unmanned as well, so
while we paid to ride no one checked.
We followed signs to go way out of our way before finally
getting to security at Gatwick Airport. Since we weren’t checking luggage, we could have just gone
straight there but we followed the signs. We were very early so there was no
rush. We did not have TSA pre check here though! So we got in a pretty big line
and it was moving pretty well because they had a lot of screener lines open.
They were not removing shoes unless you set off the metal detectors, so that
helped. Plus they put everything that goes through the x-ray machine in a
plastic tub including 22’ rolling suitcases and they roll them full on the top
level of the rollers/belts and push them back to the front on the bottom level
so that keeps things moving nicely too. It was almost as painless as getting
through RDU on Monday.
The flight was pretty bumpy but start but smoothed out, which was good because on a 1 hour flight BA served breakfast and beverages. It was a cold breakfast but still. On a 1 hour flight in the US, they probably wouldn’t even serve a beverage! It was an orange juice, a croissant with a slice of white cheese in it, and a cup of strawberry/banana bircher muesli. It was like a cold cup of thick oatmeal, strawberry flavored. It was not like anything I ever had before but I liked it. Clay refused his because he said he just ate. So did I, but you don’t ever know when traveling how long (or how soon) your next opportunity for food might come. He drank my juice, and ate half the slice of cheese. I had the yogurt/muesli and the other half of the slice of cheese. We each had 3 ice cubes and a small cup of Coke Zero. The flight landed on time. It was a 3/3 seating arrangement which is never a happy time. It was also regular coach class which meant knees touching the seat in front of you. We’ve been spoiled by the premium economy class of American that we’ve been consistently using for the past couple of years. But, it was only a 1 hour flight!
Our documents from Gohagan said that the airport transfer
was one bus at 12:35pm. They had also called and spoken to us and they were firm about those
airport transfers with no flexibility. So, we when on through Immigration and
into baggage claim and sat down and put on our Gohagan name tags and luggage
tags and read again where to go (Terminal B, the other one!) to meet the rep
for the transfer. It was about 10 am and we thought we had 2 hours to kill.
There was no re-entry to the area we were in and we didn’t want to leave until
we were sure where to go next. Clay needed a bathroom and there were none in
baggage claim Terminal A, so we were the last people to leave after all the
luggage had been picked up from an Amsterdam flight and ours. Our tour director for the
next week, Monika, was right outside the door going nuts. She had our flight
information and was holding a bus for us! She told me if I ever do this again to
come right out because probably no guide or tour director is going to leave you at the airport
for 2 hours. I assured her that was exactly what Gohagan had promised me. Anyway, she had 2
on an earlier flight on the bus and picked up 2 from the Amsterdam flight that
had landed shortly before us and then she had us. She said that everyone else
on the pre-program was arriving on a 1:15pm flight and that was why she had
scrapped Gohagan’s plan. Because the bulk of the guests would arrive too late
for the bus and 6 would have a 2+hour wait and she didn’t consider any of that
reasonable. We had received 2 vouchers
for transfers to and from the airport for each of us. No one collected our
transfer voucher slips.
Monika left us because she had more people to collect until she brought them back after 2pm. We did not want to hang around to hear from her and get a map so we asked the guy that checked us in and he was quite helpful. What we never asked and he and Monika never offered was that the restaurants pretty much stop serving about 4 to 4:30pm and they don’t open for dinner until after 7 or 7:30pm.
We had started out walking at 12:30pm. We were hoping to last until 5 or 5:30pm and get dinner and try to be at the water mirror on the riverfront to see the lights at night per the hotel guy’s recommendation. We weren’t sure that we could make it to 7:45pm which is official sunset here tonight, but we were going to try to move dinner back an hour or two tonight to try to get on the right time zone. Especially since we usually dine early and in Europe they seem to dine late. Anyway, that plan failed profoundly due to the restaurant hours and we should probably have anticipated that. But, we didn't! Clay had been looking forward to eating dinner here, I am not sure what he wanted other than part of my steak frites. Maybe tomorrow. We snacked so much to keep going all afternoon that when we finally got to the ham and cheese sandwiches we carried back in the hotel room, we couldn’t even finish them. We had a lot of sodas and junk food all day today.
The macarons here were even better than the Sprungli ones Clay got in Luxembourg. We paid €1 or €1.35 a piece for them. They were good, but I don’t know if they were that good. The last place we bought them and they wrapped them up in box like a present! (They were not as tasty though!) Baillardran, the €1.35 place, just dropped them in a brown paper sack! We tried a lot of flavors but our favorite was the very first speculoos macaron we found! We did see macarons in one shop across from the Grand Theatre that sold them by weight, equaling under €1 a piece but we didn't buy any there.
We walked over most of the pedestrian street parts of old
town and saw a huge police presence with an equal number of some kind of demonstrators
outside St. Andre Cathedral and bell tower. That was a circled item on the map
the hotel guy gave us but it was locked up and we could only dodge police and
demonstrators walking around the outside. (The good news is that I think we get
to tour it tomorrow as part of our guided city tour before the trip to St.
Emilion.) Anyway after that we headed in the opposite direction to escape what
looked to be inevitable trouble and the noise of it anyway.
We stopped and sat in a doner place. They used an electric
hand tool to shave off lamb or chicken. They looked identical. Clay was
chatting up the guy behind the counter because it reminded him of shwarmas in
Libya. The guy gave us some restaurant suggestions which we were unable to use today.
We only found 2 of the places he recommended and both were near the Grand
Theatre. Anyway, the guy wound up sticking some of his shaved meat on a
toothpick and handing it to Clay. He was going to make me one, but I waved him
off. Clay insisted I try his and he told me it was chicken. It was obviously
not and I tasted it and said so, that was when the doner guy said one was lamb and one was
chicken. Lamb, the other white meat. We shared a chicken and cheese panini and
fries. It was good and was a chicken breast and not the doner meat as I saw it being made, Clay says not that it was doner shavings.
We walked all the way down to the waterfront along the Garonne River to see the water mirror in daylight and figure out if we wanted to be down there at nightfall. When we got there we noticed a little cart. We thought it might be ice cream, but it was oysters! Who knew? It was a guy shucking and selling raw farm-raised oysters by the half dozen. Clay had to have some. They were small and salty and he liked them. They were farmed in the Arcachon Basin of the Garonne River. The Arcachon is to France as the Chesapeake Bay is to the USA, I think. The Garonne is joined to the Dordogne, which is where we are headed. The Garonne is navigable by ocean cruise ships as far as Bordeaux and the Arcachone Bay has huge tides that reverse the flow of the Garonne at high tides.
We used a public toilette that was a large oval kiosk on the
street. I went first. It turns out you have to let a cleaning cycle happen
between the person before you and you. That was not clear to me and there were
2 men waiting behind me and both said NON when I walked in behind the guy who
was already in there. But, the door closed behind me and immediately
reopened and the first guy behind me in line waved & pulled me out. He pulled me around
to the pointy part of the oval to show me that it said in French, of course, to
please wait while it lavaged. OK! The 2 men had a good laugh at the thought of
me locked in there for the wash cycle. It was still pretty nasty in there, but now it was
all wet too. It was better than nothing though so we were both glad to have it
there.
Clay was showered and asleep in bed by 6pm. It is 7pm now and I just turned away the maid with turndown service even though I had put the do not disturb sign out about 5pm when we got in here. Oh well. I wonder what she was offering that she thought I would want her to ignore the do not disturb sign for it? I am sweating and tired too. I had a hard day today. My toes on my right foot kept fisting under as I walked today. The longer I walked the quicker it would happen. So we spent a lot of time sitting and me kicking off my shoe and trying to straighten them out. I didn’t have this problem at all yesterday. I never know what it’s going to be. Anyway I need a shower and bed too. So I am off.
It turns out that our first day of our $695pp 2-night Bordeaux pre-tour included only the hotel and a transfer from the airport. That seems high, but tomorrow and the next morning we'll get breakfast as well as a Bordeaux city tour and an afternoon in St. Emilion with a winery visit and wine tasting. By the way, we paid $3195 each for the 7-night Village Life in the Dordogne tour and we paid $1271.90 each for our roundtrip AA flights from RDU to London. We paid £78.39 each for our roundtrip BA flights from London to Bordeaux.
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