Porto to London

We woke to rain this morning and lots of it. Ian gave his dad a call to wish him a happy birthday which he was surprised but pleased to hear from him, he was off to an Indian dinner with Malcolm and Alex.

We finished packing and then headed down to the foyer of our apartment building to wait for our driver, we waited and waited and waited. I tried calling the host without luck so at 9.15 we headed up to the taxi rank to get a taxi to the airport - not happy Jan! Just as we were getting to the rank Diana the host called us and said she would get onto the driver. We waited 5 minutes and when we had heard nothing we got in the cab. A minute later the driver called to say he was on his way and I told him that wasn’t good enough and he wasn’t required, he didn’t even bother apologising or giving any kind of excuse! I then rang Diana back and told her I wasn’t happy and wanted a full refund, she was very apologetic.

We got to the airport in about 20 minutes and then joined the line to drop off our bags. Initially the line moved quite slowly but then a few more check in counters were opened and it went quite quickly. Even though it had started raining at 6am it stopped when we were outside waiting for our driver and getting a taxi and again when we boarded the plane, which was quite delayed, but they somehow made up the time and e of phone so we landed at London City Airport about 5 minutes late.

We then had to locate our driver who we had organised to take us to the Sofitel at Heathrow. I had paid an additional £5 to have a driver meet us inside, but that didn’t happen and we finally found him at the pick up area after a couple of phone calls. I was pissed off to start with - not with the driver but with the company we booked with but decided to let it drop. Our drive across to Heathrow took us right through the centre of London and it was nice to revisit some of the areas we had explored in September. There was a bit of traffic because there had been a rally/protest which had only recently ended, so some streets were still closed off.

We got to our hotel just after 4pm, we settled in, then went and has afternoon tea before walking over to terminal 5 to check out what we would need to do in the morning and also to top up the Oyster cards Sue and Ross had lent us.

We had dinner in the hotel restaurant which was very nice and a great sleep in the wonderfully comfortable beds at the Sofitel. The trip ahead is a long one and we are in economy on the way home. Sitting next to us was a lovely young lady from Perth who had been in Europe at a professional swim meet - she swims for the US, a Washington team. Her name is Brianna Throssell and she was in the 200 metre Butterfly final in Rio and hopes to represent Australia again at the next Olympic Games in 2020.Read more