Somehow we managed to get a few hours of sleep as we passed over the North Atlantic. At about 9 am (London time), Obbie got up to walk a lap around the cabin and stretch his legs. Stopping by one of the doors, he looked out the window at the cloud tops, noticed a tiny island through a hole in the clouds below, and then the cliffs of an actual shore line to the right of that. Land Ho!

Our landing was so smooth, we couldn’t detect the actual moment the wheels touched the ground. When the door of that overgrown tin can finally opened, over 200 people who had been cooped up in there for eight hours tried to get out at once. We made our way to “Passport Control” – that’s English for Immigration, and then waited an eternity (actually, about an hour) for our packs to appear on the baggage carousel. We followed the signs for customs.

The customs area was a wide corridor lined with stainless steel tables, and nothing else. Expecting at some point to be questioned, we suddenly found ourselves in the arrival area, where crowds of people looked for anticipated familiar faces to appear. We found some chairs and spent time getting our bearings.

First order of business was to get some money. The money changer’s worst enemy is the cash machine. With our good-old familiar TYME card, we asked for 100 pounds, and out came 5 colorful pieces of paper with the queen’s picture and the number 20 in the corner. Next, it was time to spend some of that English money on a London map. After figuring out how to spend our first afternoon in London, and figuring out how to get there, it was time to walk what seemed like miles of tunnels to the Underground station.

Before we got on the “tube,” we bought day passes. For 4.90 pounds it entitles you to ride any tube line or bus that you wish. The only catch is that you can’t use it before 9:30 am on weekdays … no big deal for us. If you plan to be in town for, say, three days, you can buy all three passes at once. And they take credit cards.

Our first target was Waterloo Station. We figured we could store our bags there while getting oriented to central London. But storage lockers were a thing of the past in London for much longer than they were in Chicago … anyplace the IRA could hide a bomb was gone. This included storage lockers and trash cans. To store our packs, we had to pay 4 pounds per pack to have them stored in a facility called Left Luggage. Most of that money subsidized the now-familiar x-ray machine that our bags had to pass through once again.

From Waterloo Station, we crossed the Thames to The Strand. After grabbing some coffee, we walked down Whitehall toward the Parliament Building and Big Ben. Along the way we stumbled onto a pro-cannabis rally in Trafalgar Square where we were kindly entertained by some new local friends. As the afternoon wound down, we made our way across the Westminster Bridge, and back to our starting point.

At Waterloo Station, we collected our packs and took the tube to Stanmore, a suburban station near the home of Michael and Gloria (in-laws of family members we connected with at a wedding a few years earlier), our base for the next few days.

So far, having spent time in New York makes it easier to adjust to London. The crowds, the tube system, and many other facets of big-city life there were eerily reminiscent of our own First City.