We are safely back in the Gatwick Airport in London after escaping to enjoy our 14-hour layover as much as we could. While several members stayed here at the airport to catch up on their sleep and card games, most of us checked our baggage and caught a train into central London. My 9-person tour group (safety in numbers!) charged through a whirlwind of London sights, hitting first St. James' Park, Buckingham Palace, the Royal Mews, caught a glimpse of the London Eye, as well as the changing of the guard (in the midst of the London Race! -- all the streets were barricaded through the city centre, very convenient for walking tourists!), Trafalgar Square, the delicious and nutritious offerings of Prêt à Manger, and Big Ben striking 12 noon. (To give you a frame of reference for time -- we left Gatwick around 10 a.m.!) From there we hopped on the Tube and went north to King's Cross, where Amanda and I tried our luck at getting into Hogwarts via the famous Platform 9 and 3/4. (We didn't get in but we figure we might just be too old for Hogwarts.) With most of our group drooping by this time (it being about 7 in the morning, Edmonton time), we headed to Starbucks next, and then back to Gatwick. We'll meet up with the rest of the tour group at 6:30 here at the airport, in time to check in for our 9:30 p.m. Air Namibia flight.
Sleep deprivation is becoming an issue, as you might suspect. Some of us were lucky enough to catch some shut-eye on the bus down to Calgary or on the Calgary-London flight. I'm always a little in awe of people who can manage to sleep on planes, which are not designed for living humans but for some kind of elastic-boned, short-legged alien race whose bodies are made of a plastic compressible substance, and whose ears come equipped with earlids, capable of blocking out crying babies, yapping neighbours, and flight attendants with spectacularly awful timing (Flight Attendant: "EARPHONES? ADAPTORS?" Passenger: "GAH! WHERE DID YOU COME FROM, YOU NINJA-POWERED FREAK OF NATURE?")
So -- many of us are still battling our internal clocks, which told us that we arrived in London around midnight Saturday and then proceeded to tour the city until the crack of Alberta dawn and beyond. The upside of this level of exhaustion (besides cementing my place as the coveted Patient Zero for the Tour Cold) is that everything starts to seem really hilarious after a certain point. Kim demonstrated this on the return journey on the Gatwick Express, telling our group a funny story about her time with Up With People -- at least, that's what we *think* it was about. It was pretty difficult to discern her words between the way her voice had slipped up two hysterical octaves to hover around a Queen of the Night F, and the way she couldn't choke out more than a few words before tearing up with hilarity.
Another group of us, enjoying 'tomahto' soup in a Gatwick eatery, got a severe fit of the giggles when I looked down and observed that I had been eating my single bowl of soup for HOURS and STILL WASN'T DONE. Our waiter was polite but wisely kept his distance after we proved that snorting giggles are, in fact, highly contagious.
In any case, if I can manage to stay awake long enough to catch our flight to Namibia, I fully expect that I'll be able to sleep -- in spite of my sad lack of compressible bones and earlids.
Edited to add: Apparently we had far less of a fabulous time in London than certain members of the choir, who actually stalked met up with Kiefer Sutherland!
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