Planes, Trains and…More Trains

10:40pm we began our 9-hour flight from SeaTac to Heathrow. Perfect, my bedtime!! Well, nope. I tried watching a movie and got too sleepy, then I couldn’t fall asleep and turned the movie back on. Repeat. This was how I occupied my 9 hours but it was a nice plane (777) and good service and food. Navigated the maze that is Heathrow Airport and all the signage bombardment down each passageway. The pic above stopped me a bit in my tracks. Thinking the jet lag was already having its way with me, I was wondering if perhaps we were supposed to have grown antlers while flying over the pole because clearly here was a sign directing a human/deer. (If any of you would like to pose a potential caption for this picture, I’d love to hear- please put in comments below!) Next we stumbled our way through securing the Piccadilly tube line to our hotel by Euston Station. Yummy pizza stop where we found a new appetizer love: buffalo mozzarella on homemade sourdough toast with rocket and sun dried tomatoes. “What is buffalo mozzarella?”, we ask. Well, it’s about a 2 X 3 inch wet blob of white mozzarella deliciousness. Our hotel had the trappings of very fanciness but was mostly just clean but very small with a super odd bathroom that felt like being on a boat. The whole thing was a shower with a toilet and sink off to the side. Needless to say, it was not at all difficult for Tom to unknowingly drench the entire toilet paper roll so that it also looked like buffalo mozzarella. Euston Station, just a hop and skip down the road looked like it had seen much better days but overall it was fairly easy to navigate which platform to rush with the crowd when the reader board flashed our info. We were seated in cabin F, facing backwards with a table in front of us. When no one showed to take the front-facing seats, we swapped and enjoyed staring out the window for the next 4 hours (a favorite pastime for both Tom and me) as we absorbed all the visual delights of a new place: new lambs with their mamas, canals and longboats, hedges, rolling grass, yellow fields, rows of stone homes with chimney pots, and finally near the end, big bare hills in the Lake District that looked much like those in Eastern, WA near the Columbia River. Finally wend our way to the adorablest of adorable little towns, St. Bees, our starting point for the Coast to Coast hike- tomorrow morning!!!