The Arrival

Paddington says Hello, welcome to London and Mind the Gap.

We changed our arrive-in-London schedule to include our first night at a hotel. That wasn't the original plan when we started piecing together this little enterprise back in the spring, but a thing or two came up and we had enough in the budget. No biggie.  

At the risk of absurdest understatement, London has a lot of hotels, and rather than float our world-traveler dinghy out on Facebook soliciting London hotel recommendations (because, how seriously pretentious is that?), we figured proximity to lots of Tube options and ease of access to/from Heathrow made the most sense. We weren't planning to spend a lot of time at the hotel - just a bed, a TV with a sleep timer and wi-fi. We're easy.

I had also, in the last half-year, acquired a cheerfully inexplicable obsession with the film version of Paddington, which came out in the States last January, dragging Sharon to three showings in four weeks. I hadn't read the books as a kid, and was only dimly aware of the polite, quasi-refugee bear's iconic status as a children's book character in the UK, but the film version, well-received by critics on both sides of the puddle, really beguiled and charmed me. I kind of wanted to see the brass statue they erected at Paddington Station in London, and being a central Tube station...well, there ya go. We booked Sunday night at the Norfolk Towers Hotel, one of several dozen in the Paddington Station neighborhood. Affordable by London standards, which is a fairly daunting scale.

Strung out as expected by a four hour flight to Newark and eight hours to Heathrow, unmet at the airport, we collected our bags and went down the escalator at the futuristic Terminal 2 (The Queen's Terminal) to grab a smoke in a grubby little corner beside one of the taxi access lanes.  A handful of youngish Euro-types were thumbing their iPhones on the three prison-grade benches grudgingly provided for smokers. We propped up against the perspex divider wall and chatted with a twitchy 40-ish British RAF veteran with a nasty stutter and a grin yawning of missing teeth. He was clutching a bouquet of flowers, preparing to meet his wife arriving on a flight from Seattle. I think he said she was American, but his accent was a little deep for me, and I never really got a hang of his stutter rhythm, so I missed a lot of what he said to us. He said he liked the States, had been to Portland, Florida and Kansas. Why Kansas? came immediately to mind (no offense, Kansans...), but I thought better of pursuing that odd detail. He was friendly enough, wished us a good time on our holiday and sallied off to baggage claim to meet the missus.

We purchased a couple of express rail tickets to Paddington Station, our first chance to test our travel-advisory cleared credit cards (success!) and made our way to the platform, meeting up with an American couple from Chicago who were just starting their four week trip through England, Wales and Scotland. We briefly traded notes on travel through the country and our favorite places. They said they were expecting lousy weather in Edinburgh, which we understand is a pretty safe bet more or less any time.

The train was fast and comfortable - Paddington Station was a cavernous dissonance of garbled departure announcements, hissing train cars and the rush of luggage toting travelers moving in every direction. It had been a while since I'd been in a train station of any significance, and I had forgotten the somewhat chaotic navigation imperatives they impose. Consisting mostly of, if you don't know where you're going, don't stand out in the middle of traffic trying to figure it out.

I went up to information booth, caught the eye of the lady behind the counter and asked where the Paddington statue was. Platform 1, she pointed, seemingly a bit annoyed.

At the commencement of two weeks' worth of destination and photo-op musts, we were officially one for one.

We made our way out of the station and up the ramp leading to Praed Street, in the soft London drizzle.

Hello, England.