I Love Sheep . . .

and that is all I have to say about my trip to London and Aviemore . . . but I guess that would make for a pretty crappy post.

So here it goes . . . 

We left good ol’ Newark at 9:00PM Tuesday night.  One of the best flights I have ever been on was about 10 years ago when I last went to London.  That trip made such an impression on me that I was determined to fly Virgin Atlantic again . . . and so we did.  VA did not disappoint:

Amusing ourselves before take off–note how tired we already look . . . it only gets worse : )

Denis couldn’t have been happier . . . mini diet cokes and 64 movies to choose from.

I kid you not . . . my dinner was delicious.  (I am NOT being sarcastic.) It was tortellini if you couldn’t tell. 

Sexy, yeah?  Those eye mask thingys really work, and the noise canceling headphones are heaven.

Classic window picture : )

Unfortunately I didn’t sleep at all on the flight over.  I guess I could have (I was certainly tired enough) but I was thoroughly enjoying my book and I got to watch Juno, can you blame me for not sleeping? So, needless to say, once we arrived in England, I needed some sleep–badly.  It took some trial and error, but we finally made it to our hotel via the Underground and some wandering around Paddington. Thank God our room was ready for us, or so we thought . . . after trekking up to the fifth floor, we discovered that the air conditioning was being worked on . . . right inside our room. What the hell.  I looked like I was about to die; the guy was like, “Jet lag, huh?”  Was it that obvious : ) and then he proceeded to tell us that he was going to be in and out of the room for the rest of the afternoon.  BAH.  So Denis went back downstairs where the front desk girl said the working guy would only be in the room for ten more minutes. What? I did not want to play this game.  Finally after waiting however long (I honestly have no clue as I think I was beginning to hallucinate) Denis told the guy that we would be in the room sleeping and if they needed to get in then knock.  Even with the banging and yelling–we died for a couple of hours. They did have to come in once. I hid in the bathroom : )

The room was good–even though the bed was crazy hard, it was still comfortable, and it was nicely decorated and not sketchy . . . but, damn, that room was small.  I don’t think the pictures do it justice, but there was literally about 10-12 inches on one side of the bed and about three feet of space at the foot of it, and that was all:

    

When we finally came to (it was about three hours later) we figured a walk in the park would be helpful. Part of the reason I chose the hotel I did was because Hyde Park was right down the street, so we wandered off. Even though it was pretty cloudy and kind of cold, the park was still great:

Happy little waterfall . . . Bob Ross would be in heaven.

We were certainly much happier than we were a couple of hours ago.

 

I think these grey geese made the vacation for me (almost as much as the sheep did).  Okay–story time–When I was at Rutgers, I would often go running in Johnson Park.  One day I saw this weird group of grayish geese; they weren’t white geese, and they weren’t Canadian geese.  The only explanation I could come up with was that the white goose (there was always one or two hanging out with the special geese) took a look at the Canadian goose, and suddenly realized what he/she was missing . . . voila . . . my fun goose was produced.  I started calling them inbred friends . . . I know that this is entirely wrong, as even if my theory was correct, they would be by no means inbred but rather interracial friends, but the name stuck.  I had never seen any water fowl like these, and every time I spotted them on a run, I would feel a little happier (come on, I was running, give me a break).  Then one day (like years later, actually) I finally figured out that my inbred friends were really grey geese . . . Like you really needed to know this . . . but anyway, they were every where in the London parks.  And it was good. 

Okay, I have to go to sleep now, so more later . . .