And, we are back from spending a week in Europe. What a great trip! All three of us (my mom, Derrick and I) went to England first. It so happened that we all left Columbus on the same day but on different flights and my mom had the least luck (or what I call it she was picked by the Travel Fairy).
I left next flying via Houston. My mom was going with me so she could check in her luggage at the same time since her flight was scheduled to leave just couple of hours later. On the way to the airport though she received a phone call (it was exactly at 1PM) with airlines representative telling her that the 5PM flight to Newark was going to be delayed by several hours due to weather, which would have caused her to miss her connecting flight. So, the alternative was to catch 1:10PM flight, which at that point was already delayed by 2 hours. We had no choice but to put her on that flight.
Later, I called my mom from Houston and she told me that she just had landed in what she thought was Newark airport. Well, only after I got to Heathrow I found out that it was an emergency landing (she had no clue where it was) and by the time she got to Newark she had already missed her connecting flight. That same evening, a friend of ours emailed my brother telling him that mom was going to be in London the next day only.
Both of us flew across the ocean with no big adventures. I was lucky to have no seat-neighbors going both ways, which meant two great things: 1. No need to make a small talk and 2. I had two seats for myself! (both ways I had guys sitting on the other side of the empty seat and neither one of them seemed to mind).
Once I got to Heathrow, Kestutis- my brother- and Derrick were already waiting for me. Then two hours later we checked into our hotel and afterwards we went to meet Kamila and her parents, Ursula and Tadeush (beautiful people- too bad they didn't speak much of any of the languages that we knew though Kamila did a wonderful job translating).
Later that afternoon we took a train to go to Canterbury.
The Cathedral there was pretty nice- it is not too far from Sittingbourne (only about half an hour train ride) and we spent there the rest of the afternoon.
In the evening (around 8PM) we went back to the train station only to find out that our train was canceled. Well, no big deal- we thought- since there was another train scheduled to go at 9.20PM and there was a nice park near the station. We went back to the park but all of us were pretty tired so we just laid on the grass making plans for the next day during which we realized that ‘the next day’ as the email said that our mom was supposed to be in England was actually today! When email was written it was still Friday in U.S. but it was already Saturday in U.K when Kestutis was reading it. In fact, as we realized this, mom was already getting off the plane in Heathrow and the soonest we could get there was 3 more hours! We rushed back to the station and again- bad news! 9:20PM train was also canceled!
To make the story short, we did make it to Heathrow by around 11PM that same night and picked up our mom- unfortunately, her suitcase was missing but it was delivered to our cottage- style Bed & Breakfast the very next afternoon.
So, on day 2 for us (and day 1 for mom) we all went to Dover where we visited the Dover Castle and the War Tunnels (what a cool place!).
Frequent weather changes constantly reminded us that once again we were in Europe- seriously though, it sometimes changed every 5 minutes from warm (and almost hot) to cold to windy to rainy and back to hot.
It was a long day full of excitement, emotions, and joy that after 7 long years our mother had both of her children with her at the same time! We spent the evening at my brother’s flat looking at some pics, eating some European food (!) and sharing stories.
The next day we all went to Leeds Castle. It was a pretty nice castle and an interesting fact about it was that up until late 70’s there were actually people living there. It also had a very nice bird collection such as wide variation of parrots, swans, and such.In the evening we all went to a local pub for dinner and drinks where we also met with Ligita and Piotr. Ligita and I haven’t seen each other for 10 years so we had a wonderful time catching up!
The fourth and last day we visited a town called Rochester and that evening Derrick and I left for Ireland. We flew RyanAir (similar to Skybus in the U.S. except RyanAir flew internationally). They didn’t charge us for air tickets but airport fees, tax and luggage charges was where they got us. The flight was delayed by an hour (the staff found no need to announce the delay to passengers standing in line to get on the plane) but we got to Dublin with no problems. Oh, and one more thing, if you ever book your hotel in Europe on-line and it says the hotel is at the airport, it can mean that the hotel is in up to 20+ mile radius from the airport. We learned this really quickly from our friendly Irish cab driver.
More photos are under Travel Albums.
