We made it to London safely thanks to our friends at Virgin Airlines. We arrived on time and made it through customs without a hold up, the beauty of carry-on luggage!I tried to sleep on the plane ride over but like usual, I was unable to doze off. Virgin offers personal video in all the seat backs so I watched "The Transporter 2" and "Fun with Dick and Jane". The former was entertaining, much like the first movie, not real deep but action packed! As I type this up two weeks later I can’t even remember watching the second movie? I do remember it was horrible but I trudged through and watched the whole thing.
We met Joseph right away and went ahead and checked in for our flight to Stockholm. With four hours to kill we are on the Underground (subway) headed to the heart of London, Piccadilly Circus. We're really looking forward to getting to Stockholm, playing disc golf, taking in some of the local sites and food. We left KC almost two days ago, seems like forever.
We ate sushi (yes I love my sushi) at the fountain at Piccadilly and proceed to walk and walk. We saw Westminster Abby and a few other sites then returned to the Tube (subway) in order to get back the Heathrow for our flight to Stockholm. The flight was two hours late departing which really cut into disc golf time!
We landed at 7:15 Stockholm time (GMT +1 or Central time +7) picked up the rental car and were on the disc course by 8:15. No worries mate, the sun didn’t set until 10:30 and we were able to get in 18 holes before dark!
The course, Jarva, is a private course that costs aprox. $5 to play. It is billed as one of the finest course in Europe. No offense, but these folks need to get to KC! The course was challenging, a few par 4's along with a few par 2's that were actually rather difficult. Pete limped along, sore ribs and all and played the last 9 holes rather well considering his condition.
We got a little mis-directed finding the hotel. A man is never lost, he may be off track, or mis-directed but we always know "where we're not"! We dropped our bags at the hotel at about 11:30pm and headed to the nearest local pub/eatery. Of course the kitchen had closed but Pete talked the bartender into three enormous slices of lasagna which we proceed to engulf. Remember the sushi at Piccadilly twelve hours earlier, that was the last time we had eaten.
As Pete gimped to the bar for another round of the local pilsner, Joseph asked "What's with the sausage fest"? Not catching his drift he explained that there were no women in the establishment…..hmmm? We were never sure or not, frankly it made no difference we were in our own little world, but we may have eaten an awesome meal, scraped together at the last minute, at a gay bar 5,000 miles from home!
Later we strolled back to the hotel, had a pint at the hotel bar and tried to get directions to a few more disc courses. As helpful and friendly as the staff was, they needed a bit of education in the lay of the land in their hometown. We decided to return to Jarva the next day and seek assistance from fellow disc golfers. Before retiring for the night we decided to stay another night at the Hotel Rica instead of attempting to find new accommodations. Pete worked his magic on the front desk staff and we got the same rate as I secured via Expedia. I called Mary and was sleeping by 1:30am, tomorrow we do a two hour walking tour of downtown Stockholm and the Gamla Stag (old city).
2 comments:
great travelouge, great pix...
I had to laugh out loud at the gay bar episode. Many, many years ago, in the late 1960's when I was in the Air Force and going to Russian language school at Syracuse University, one evening our class was going to meet downtown at a bar. Three of us went together and went into the bar. It was really crowded and seemed like a typical college bar, (if you were naive and not very observant). We didn't see our classmates so figured we got there first. Finally got up to the bar and ordered drinks. I needed to use the restroom and was told it was out through the back room. Well, when I got to the backroom, I stopped dead in my tracks. There were all these men slow dancing together and some kissing. Suddenly I realized my newly bestowed Top Secret plus military clearance was in great jeopardy. I figured I would be in there when the cops pulled a raid (yes that was still happening back then). I hurried back to my friends and explained what I had discovered. We bolted for the door. One said he was just starting to wonder why there were no women there. The other said he was getting brushed up against too much and it wasn't THAT crowded. The bar we were supposed to go to was half a block down the street. We never told our classmates because we were all very afraid we would lose our security clearance.
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