Day 2- London

After a very rough waking up period and an even worse trek back to my hotel, I managed to bathe, change clothes, pack up and get out the door just in time to be an hour and a half late for checkout.

From there, I headed back to the same Leiscester Square Burger King that had served so well as a meeting point the evening before, as it was to perform the same purpose today. At a prompt 2:00, our group was met once more (sans Troy who obviously had some sort of sins for which to absolve and was thus charged with returning the rental car) to spend some quality time eating food, drinking beer and waiting for Troy.

After wandering through the numerous streets of London, we arrived at some square or another whose name I cannot remember. We headed to a sort of under-street-level outdoor pub to relax for the afternoon. After waiting the requisite time, it was decided that it was my duty to go get Troy. I was, to say the least, apprehensive. I had no idea how I’d gotten there much less an idea of how to get back, so finding Leiscester Square was a hit-or-miss proposition at best. Had I not had a map, it would have been assured disaster, which is bad because I didn’t. Denise gave me some directions on how to get there, which involved one turn before going straight for a long time. Here is problem number one: there aren’t a great many straight lines when five to eight roads meet at an intersection. London’s city planners appear to have decided to save themselves some traffic lights by just packing as many streets as they can into the intersections. Thus, I guessed on what seemed to be a straight line six or eight times and somehow ended up finding Troy at the required location. However, this leant itself to a new problem, that being the aforementioned problem that I still did not know from where I had come and I had no idea how to get back there. Yes, when I say I did not know from where I had come, that includes the name of the square at which I had started. Common sense, as well as sense of direction, had gotten lost before we'd first gotten to the pub, so returning was very similar to playing darts blindfolded.

After a few wrong turns, retracings and a stop at Pizza Hut for some directions (How the heck would you give directions to a person who doesn’t know where he is trying to go?) we did finally all got together in the correct to location to figure out that we had no idea how we were getting to Amsterdam that evening.

We knew we (Rob, Troy and I) were going to Amsterdam. That part was actually planned. However, the rest of the plan was to purchase one of the cheap airline tickets from the back of the newspaper and hop on a flight. About the only time this would not work just fine is on a major holiday or when it is Sunday afternoon and everyplace selling such tickets is closed. In case you had not guessed, we were several hours late for church.

After the usual dose of confusion and indecisiveness while we were all being too goddamn relaxed and accommodating, finally a plan was put together for getting to Amsterdam. We would use the finest transportation known to man: we were taking the bus. We drank more, just to be sure we would sleep on the bus.

We went to the station and, before we left, Denise was kind enough to give us a few good hints on some things to do in Amsterdam. Purple Haze was one, Orange-something was another and then she related an interesting tales from ‘shrooming in Edinborough. This information was very useful, if for no other reason than mental preparation for where we were going. If this were fiction, I would not have changed that conversation one bit.

We said our good-byes to Denise, boarded our bus and we were on the road.