Thursday, January 11 – Harrow on the Hill

You’ve been on edge, waiting to hear how I slept, haven’t you? Well, I have some surprisingly good news to report. By 7:30 last night I was done. Unable to keep my eyes open. So I gave in and went to bed. Fell asleep straight away. And then I woke up at 12:30am. Ugh! Fortunately though after about 30 minutes of reading I was ready to go back to sleep. I didn’t wake up again until 8:30am. Awesome! I wasn’t in a hurry to get out of bed either; spent the next couple hours there reading. A nice morning!

I spent the afternoon working on my first Journal Entry for this trip. It took longer than expected, as I ended up writing more than typical (sorry about that!). Also, getting things set up for the new separate London trip page took some time; especially since I had forgotten how I had formatted the pages for the other trips from when I did the editing last summer! I’m a mess!

I had a fun evening though. My hosts, Mary & Tony, invited me to join them for dinner. A home-cooked meal? Yes, please!

Friday, January 12 – Harrow on the Hill

Even though I left several years ago, I’ve remained on the emailing list of several London museums and entertainment venues. I guess I could have stopped the emails, but I kind of like reading them. And yesterday I received a very interesting email from The Royal Albert Hall. It announced two shows in March by The Who, to benefit the Teenage Cancer Trust. I would definitely like to attend that! Tickets went on sale this morning at 9am. I logged into the RAH website at around 8:50 and was informed that I had been placed in a holding area with all of the other interested folks; at 9am we would then be placed in a random order queue to acquire tickets. Okay. Well, 9am rolls around, and my number is…4,000 something. Yikes! (not Taylor Swift terrible at least!). It took me about an hour to get to the head of the line, and by then I figured my chance of getting a decent seat was minimal. However, I ended up snagging one in the 7th row of the stalls, which I was pleased with. I imagine the fact that they’re doing two shows, and I only needed one ticket, helped get me to a good spot. So I now have two concerts to attend at The RAH during my stay here. Some of you know about the other one, but I’ll hold back those details for later.

After being a slug all day yesterday, I decided I needed to get out today and do some walking around. I went down to the South Harrow area and continued out further to Northolt. On the way back I picked up some groceries at ALDI. (This is exciting stuff, isn’t it?) The only two photos of (questionable) interest from my walk are presented below…

Travel Notes

In Journal Entries from past trips I’ve gone through some of the things I’ve done to prepare for an extended time away from home and outside of the U.S. Probably not worth repeated them here, other than to say I basically have done all of the same things, including items like using a VPN in conjunction with local wireless internet access, and purchasing travel medical insurance. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

One additional thing I’ve done for this trip relates to my phone. Last summer I finally upgraded from my iPhone 6. It was long ago no longer supported by Apple, and some of the apps stopped working. I gave in to planned obsolescence! In addition to the physical SIM card, the new iPhones now also offer the option of installing two eSIMs. I used one of those eSIMs for my AT&T service in the U.S., and for this trip I downloaded a U.K. data-only eSIM. This U.K. SIM cost $6, offering 3Gb of data with a 30 day validity. This compares to AT&T charging me $10/day for international service (with a maximum of $100 over a 30 day period). The caveat is that the U.K. SIM is data-only, so voice service is not included. But that’s not a big deal for me. (I can make cheap (or free) phone calls when I have WiFi access) Also, the 3Gb of data may not seem like a lot, but I have the option of topping it up if I run low before the 30 days are up.

While we’re on the subject of new electronics, I also bought a new laptop over the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend. My previous one was 12 years old, running Windows 7 (also no longer supported). The wake up moment occurred in the fall when it booted up to the dreaded blue screen! I was able to restore its settings, but was a little concerned! (Remember when I dropped the laptop at the Bogota airport security checkpoint last year? And it kept on ticking? I have to say that laptop was a trooper)

Final piece of housekeeping…

These first two Journal Entries have been brutally boring, I know. But bear with me, I promise it will get better. I plan on heading into the city tomorrow and do some roaming around. Hopefully some good photos will be the result!