OMGLondon2 - The Onset

Oh me oh my, but I seem to have returned at last from OMGLondon and OMGBath. Turns out, a week is a whole lot longer than four days when it comes to travel. At least, for me it is.

Because let me tell you, I was wrecked when I got home. I'm better now, but only after four solid days of moaning and lying in bed and mainlining hot tea with honey. Oh, and cats. It involved lots of cats, too.

But we'll get to that later, if at all, really, since the whole point is to find out how I managed to make myself so doggone sleepy and achey and collapsey, right?

Right.

So a little over a week ago, Melissa and I set out for our triumphant return to London. (If you're just joining our show, you might want to check out what happened when we visited London last year.)

Everything went rather well in the airport, with us arriving nice and early, having a little delicious airport food for dinner, and letting Fairfax out for a little romp before boarding.

Once we got on the plane, Melissa admitted that she was already starting to show very worrying signs of a head cold, which turned out to be the case. And I want to say right now that she was a hero for how eagerly she slogged through the better part of London and Bath for a whole week, if she felt then anything like what I feel now.

Seriously. Let's all give her a round of applause.

So we flew the red-eye from Boston to Heathrow, and arrived in London far too early in the morning. Naturally, neither of us managed to sleep at all on the flight.

How can you sleep when you know that adorable little taxicabs like these are just waiting to whisk you away to your hotel room? It would seem rude, somehow, to sleep. Knowing that.

So our taxi driver provided the requisite whisking for us, once we had successfully navigated the waters of customs and security, and peppered our sleep brains with uncomfortable questions about whether or no we supported Obama, and wasn't it a shame the way all these foreigners were taking all the jobs.

We maintained an awkward silence for most of the trip.

It was rainy and foggy, just the way London should be. And we were crossing our fingers that our hotel would magically have our room ready for us to collapse into, despite the early hour.

We got to the hotel, and of course the room wasn't ready. No huge surprise, since it couldn't have been much later than 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. So we deposited our bags with the porter and made our way around the block to our favorite place in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Where we sat in the largely deserted William Morris Room at the V & A and ate scones, our brains rapidly turning to mush.

After a few minutes of this, we realized that we were really not fit for public consumption in our present state of brain-mushiness, so we walked the three blocks back to our hotel, planning on camping out in the lobby until our room was ready. We figured that if we curled up on the lobby couches like vagrants, they might be a little more sprightly in the room-getting-ready department.

What was the name of our hotel, you ask? Oh, nothing special...

I mean, I knew we wanted to stay close to the V&A. And when I found one called The Regency, well, it was pretty much a done deal.

Fortunately, they had a nice little fire going in the lobby, which I promptly curled up in front of, having that moment come down with a bad case of the exhaustion shivers. Let's curl up in front of it now, shall we?

I think you can actually hear me shivering in the background.

Eventually, they got our room ready for us, and we collapsed gratefully within. A few hours later, we emerged, refreshed, to find dinner in our wonderful South Kensington neighborhood.

This, for instance, was just around the corner from us, although we opted not to go inside.

Eventually, we settled on a delightful little Indian restaurant a short walk away. It turned out to be essential that it be a short walk away, as we filled ourselves full to bursting of delicious Indian food, and would have needed assistance to get home were it any further away.

As it was, we trundled ourselves with relative ease back to our new home, and got all collapsey again before facing a new day.

Up next: Let's Walk All Over London!