2023-08-06: Heading to Africa

Today is a travel day. It was our last morning in London. We didn’t have any sightseeing planned for today so we slept in a little later. We didn’t get up until 9:00. We thought about taking a quick trip to St. Paul’s Cathedral. We took a look at the website to see if there were any tickets available when we realized that it’s Sunday and they don’t allow sightseeing on Sundays due to worship services. So, that’s the third time Darrell has been to London and has yet to see the inside of the cathedral. I guess we’ll have to go back again.

We grabbed breakfast at the hotel and then finished re-packing our bags. We still had an hour until the taxi was scheduled to pick us up so Darrell and Patrick went for a bit of a walk. Our hotel was located on Leicester Square. There are a few theatres around the square and they do a lot of movie premiers there. There are about a dozen bronze statues scattered around the square. They found and took pictures of all the statues before returning to the hotel.

At 11:45am we checked out of the hotel and walked a block to a bar called Ku Bar. That’s where we were supposed to meet our taxi since they can’t drive into Leicester Square. Upon arrival at Ku Bar, we noticed a big “road closed” sign in front of the bar. Well, the taxi won’t be able to pick us up there. We walked another block down to where the road was open hoping that the taxi would show up there instead. As we were walking, we did see a taxi pull up to the closed road. Luckily, it was our taxi. We got our gear loaded in and we were off to the London City Airport.

The driver had just started his shift and quickly realized there were a bunch of roads closed in the area. We saw some people running and realized there was a marathon happening which is why the roads were closed. That made the drive to the airport a little longer than anticipated, but we still arrived with plenty of time. They usually tell you to be at the airport 3 hours early for an international flight. We were about 3.5 hours early. We tried to check in but they told us check-ins at the London City Airport only open 2 hours prior to flight. Great. London City Airport is small and there’s really nowhere to sit prior to checking in. So, we found a nice spot on the floor and parked ourselves for 1.5 hours. Finally we were able to check in and made our way to our gate. Our flight was about 15 minutes late leaving, but they made up the time in the air and we landed in Zurich on time.

We had a 3.5 hour layover in Zurich. Our bags were checked through to Cape Town so we just had to go through another secrurity check between terminals. We had access to the Swiss Airlines lounge in Zurich. We located it and made our way there. We parked in the lounge and relaxed for a couple of hours. Shortly before 10:00pm, we made our way down to our gate. Before too long we were boarding the plane and heading to Johannesburg..

We were in business class for this flight. We all watched a movie while we were served some dinner. It was well after midnight at this point so we relaxed and got some rest.