London!

Now this was fun!!

We booked the Holiday Inn London-Heathrow M4 Jct.4 in West Drayton, England for 3 nights before a transatlantic cruise. It was booked with reward points, and I always have trouble finding any faults whatsoever with free stuff. I especially can't complain when it is a only a stop-off before a cruise! But let's see... I will try to be objective about the hotel stay so I can give you a good overview.

We arrived at the hotel after an 8 1/2 hour (economy) flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Heathrow Airport in England. I am so not going to review that interesting experience because, well, just because. Anyway, suffice it to say we were seriously sleep-deprived on check-in. I think the staff at the hotel were specially trained in dealing with folks in our condition, because they seemed to be able to gently ask all the right questions to get us checked in properly. They were absolutely wonderful.

We were given an "executive" room. It was so cute! Small, but quite serviceable, the room was clean, comfortable, and had a towel warmer in the bathroom. I love towel warmers.

We took a short nap on arrival and the room was dark and quiet - more proof that the hotel caters to travelers just off international flights. Too tired to go very far for dinner, we went to the hotel's "Irish" pub. The food was fine but the music was exceptionally loud, and was getting louder by the minute. We finally figured out that this was because the pub was advertising "Disco Night." An American disco in an Irish pub at an English hotel. It doesn't get much better than that. But it did. By the time we got our Boddingtons and "proper" fish and chips we had met a charming British couple and were in the midst of a fascinating conversation about politics - both British and American - when the music swelled so loud we couldn't hear ourselves talk. That's when we decided to move outside the pub into the lobby lounge. The lounge was also very busy but a little quieter, so we continued our collective solving of the world's problems until we realized that the Brits had an early flight and we were just plain 'ol tired. We retired to our cute little executive room and slept very well.

The next morning we asked the nice lady at the concierge desk how to catch a bus to downtown London. She seemed a little surprised that we wanted public transport, then directed us to the nearby bus stop (only a couple of minutes away) in front of The Plough, a local pub. I won't go into the adventures of our stay, but if you are interested, here is a link to our wonderful London holiday and subsequent cruise.

We manage to find humor in small things, and found ourselves entertained every time we got in the hotel elevator. It was like being in a "Twitter" elevator. There was a tweet for every action, all in a beautiful female British accent. "Door closing. Lift going up. Lift going down. First floor. Lift stopping. Door opening." All the chatter made us giggle. I'm sure when there were other people on the elevator at the same time as us they must've been thinking those Americans were one floor short of the lobby.

All-in-all this was a great stay, and it was the perfect start to a perfect vacation.