Europe

We slept soundly last night and, as a result of the very impressive black-out blinds in our hotel room, were surprised by how late it was when we finally got up. It was about 10:30 am when we got down to breakfast.

We had no firm plans for the day so we took our time over breakfast. It was after 12:30 pm when we finally set foot outside the hotel. We decided to just walk around for a while and soak up the atmosphere of London. London feels like it has returned to normal after the Queen’s funeral. The barricades that blocked so many of the nearby streets a couple of days ago have been taken down and we could once again walk around unimpeded. The tributes to the Queen are still evident around the city, though, even after the official mourning period has ended.

After doing a bit of shopping and walking around, we went back to the hotel for an early dinner. Since this was our last night in London (or so we thought!) we decided to have room service and spend some time this evening re-packing our bags for our flight tomorrow morning.

But it turns out that we now won’t be flying out tomorrow morning. We received a message from Qantas, telling us that our flight tomorrow has been cancelled and that we’ll now be flying out Friday morning and getting home on Saturday afternoon. This does introduce some extra complexity because finding accommodation is not that easy, nor that cheap! Since check-in for our new flight opens at 4:30 am on Friday, we considered moving to a hotel at Heathrow. But we clearly were not the first to have that idea! Every hotel near the airport is fully booked. So we will probably end up staying in the city. Hotel rates are through the roof in London at the moment and availability is scarce. We think we might be able to stay at 45 Park Lane but, if we do, we’ll be setting a new record for the amount we’ve ever paid for a hotel room for one night (and that’s saying something!).

After pondering our options for a while, we decided to go out for a walk after dinner. We got back to the hotel a little after 10:00 pm and headed to the bar for a coffee and dessert!

We got back to the room around 11:30 pm and got on the phone to American Express and Qantas to see what options we might have regarding our trip home. Qantas advised that we could transfer to any other carrier to get home if we wanted to try to get on a flight tomorrow. But after they looked at a multitude of airlines and routing options for us, and finding no availability on any airline at all, it became clear that the best option was to catch the Qantas flight home on Friday.

So now it looks like we’ll have an extra day in London. We don’t know how we’ll spend this day but we’ll figure that out tomorrow. A nice problem to have!