12 Hours in London

This Christmas Jube and I will be heading back to France to visit with la belle-famille. It took us the better part of a month to find an acceptably-priced plane ticket. Unfortunately it leaves us with a 12 hour layover in London and some of the worst ever arrival and departure times. And we have to switch airports during the layover. Added to that - we're flying into Marseille instead of Montpellier, so Beau-Papa will have to drive about an hour and a half to the airport to pick us up. I wonder if it was worth saving $400...

The only good thing about having such a long layover is that it will give Jube and me the chance to visit London together. I've been there twice before, and he has been there once, so we'll be able to take touristy pictures in front of the Houses of Parliament, ride the London Eye, have tea at the Orangery and be able to say, "We visited London!" Of course, the $400 we saved on our tickets will probably all be spent during our time in England.

I've been having a good time planning our "trip." I learned the importance of planning these things out during our trip to Vienna in 2005. We were visiting one of my friends who was teaching in Austria, and that was about all the planning I'd done. We managed to do lots of fun stuff - touring the Hapsburg palace, the cathedral catacombs, checking out Schonbrunn, and even watching the Lipizzaner stallions practice. We also had a huge fight that almost ruined our trip when my friend and I lost Jube; we didn't eat at any nice restaurants because neither of us had any idea where to find one; and we didn't even visit the art gallery that I discovered later was full of Klimt.

Our 12 hours in London will be really great with all the planning I've put into them. Now we just have to hope that we won't be too jetlagged to enjoy them...