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Day 1/2
An afternoon flight is a very civilised thing. It allows plenty of time for those last minute dashes (quad lock for phone from Werribee and new ear buds from JB HiFi) before making it in plenty of time for the airport.
Jeff and I checked ourselves and bikes in with a minimum of fuss and settled in for the wait for take-off which happened right on time. The first leg of the flight was over 14 hours, nothing that long can ever be called "good", but it was rather uneventful. We got into Doha at about 10:45pm and it was jumping. There were enough people there to rival Melbourne Airport during a busy day, I'm sure glad we passed thru when we did and not during the afternoon. The flight on to Gatwick was another 6.5 hours and we landed at 6:10am in what had actually been close to 25 hours, Exhaustion was an understatement.
We collected our bikes from baggage claim and where told we could assemble the bikes right by the conveyor belts. We certainly got some strange looks and comments from those nearby. Jeff finished assembling his bike first which was just as well
as I found I had a flat. This was quite a mystery as I had left Melbourne with some air in the tyres. Jeff must have felt sorry for me as he practically changed the tyre single handedly before we finally stood tall and walked our bikes straight thru customs and out the front door. There's a certain romance to being able to assemble your bike at the airport and ride away. The romance lasted about 30 seconds until we realised neither of us had a telephone signal for navigation, and the honeymoon was over. The ride to Croydon was just under 30 kilometers of flat to rolling hills. Nothing to worry about - apart from a car door being thrown into my path and at least another 4 times cars just plain ignored us on the road. Once we reached Croydon there was a street festival starting where we got lunch. While eating I asked Jeff where the address of our AirBnB was. You can see where this is going right? Jeff had assumed the address was in the emails he'd been exchanging with our host, and hadn't thought to ask for it, which meant we had no idea
where we were going and neither of us had SIM cards to make a call and ask. We ended up buying ourselves a coffee just to use their WiFi to get the address and made it there right on 12pm.
We freshened up and went into London to see a few sites. Westminster, Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, the parade grounds, No10, riding a double decker bus just to name a few. On the way home we grabbed a bite to eat and made our way home. The day that started out almost 48 hours ago was finally getting to us. Jeff lies snoring on the bed next to me and letters keep running off the page as I fall asleep with my hands on the keyboard. A well-earned rest for both of us should see us up for the challenge of tackling London again tomorrow.
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