Day 0 – European Inspirations – To London
As I was going to be in Europe for quite some time, I decided to take along some extra storage space. Although there are many photo storage devices available, they tended to be quite expensive when compared to SD cards and normal hard drive space.
I have a netbook so I decided to take it, along with a portable 500GB hard drive, to store my trips worth of pictures and act as a backup.
Before I left for the airport, I did a final check of all my equipment.
However, after I had passed through airport security and reached the gate, I wanted to send a quick email via the air port wi-fi to tell my folks that I had made it to the departure gate without issue and that the airplane was indeed leaving on time.
Imagine my surprise when my computer failed to boot-up! A quick check of the bios and playing with restarting off plugged-in power, I discovered that the entire operating system (an Asus linux variant) was corrupted :-(.
Well, there was nothing that I could do in the airport, so I took the alternative and phoned my parents, gave them the good and bad news, and assured them I would be in touch as soon as possible once I had arrived in London and reinstalled an operating system on my computer.
The nice thing about traveling from one capital to another is that there is a direct flight.
From Ottawa, Canada to London, England (Heathrow), one only has to leave at 6pm to arrive at 6am. Assuming you can sleep on the plane or at least reach a restful state, as flight attendants and passengers continually move about the airplane only to be halted for some well timed turbulence, you can arrive in London jet-lag free and ready to start your day on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
After collecting my bag from the airport terminal, I took the subway to Russell square. When I arrived at the designated subway station I got off and followed the various morning commuters off of the platform. We all eventually reached a couple of elevators and at the end of a hallway there was quite a big line-up. I thought that it would take a while to clear, so I decided that I would just take the stairs which were conveniently located to my right.
My first guess should of been that no one else was taking the stairs…
It was only a short walk to the hotel (after I got turned around few times).
I was fortunate as the room was available immediately, so I was able to get in a quick shower and modify my backpack and luggage from the configuration that I use for traveling on a airplane to the more desirable exploration configuration. That meant mainly moving most of the computer gear to the suitcase from the backpack along with the general minimum clothing which I had in my backpack (required if my check luggage had failed to make the journey with me.)
It was about 8:30am as I set out to explore the city. Time to really pull out the camera and get some shots. As the picture in the banner might suggest, I tend to go by foot whenever possible so as to not miss anything along the way.
