Day 2 - rather conveniently the second of Sept.

Sitting in our hotel just off Earl's Court Road (the old 'Kangaroo Valley') - having spent most of the afternoon trying to sort out various infuriatingly annoying electronic devices. Despite much forward thinking and planning by Julianne (which I am sure comes as no surprise to anyone), the Travel SIM for the mobile phone was astoundingly unsuccessful - we ended up having to purchase another prepaid SIM card just to make the calls that we were assured before leaving Australia would not be the slightest problem to make with the aforementioned non-functioning card. Then we (and by 'we', I naturally mean 'Julianne', as she is the one trying to sort all this out) weren't able to (easily) get Internet access on the tablet, thus potentially grinding our blogging to something of a premature halt - sacre bleu, mon ami, I hear you cry as one. But Julianne's tenacity knows no bounds, so here we are, blogging like there is no tomorrow.

Singapore Airport



Just to back-track slightly, all of the flights (3) were blissfully uneventful. All on time, which had us arriving at Heathrow at 6.40 in the a.m., and even more pleasingly, so did our luggage - 8 more chances then left to lose our goods and chattels.



A little sleepy...





Wide awake!!





Patrick and Isabel both did incredibly well to survive/tolerate the long periods of cramped inactivity without resorting to sibling violence as an effective means of coping. Mind you, the option of having an incredibly wide variety of televisual forms of entertainment available in the back of the backrest of the seat in front was a far cry from when we first travelled overseas,  "...ah, the good ole days", blah, blah, blah. Personally I can now attest to the delight of 'Fly fishing in the Yemen" and the whimsical creativity of 'Hugo', as well as a number of revisited comedies. Intriguing though, was the frequent offerings made of bottled water labelled 'Ocean' - O.K., granted we weren't flying over particularly large expanses of water (the Bay of Bengal being the biggest if I remember rightly - a veritable puddle in the world of seas and oceans, but nevertheless, still probably able to inflict a sizable degree of death and mayhem in the unlikely event that we plummet into it), but still, rather tactless I felt, especially as we were travelling 10 kilometres above both sea and land.



Another apparent 'improvement' was the use of 'Flightcam', a camera embedded in the tail wing of the plane and giving everyone who cared to look at it a real-time view of the aeroplane in the (again, unlikely) event of it plowing into the back of another plane. More worrying perhaps though is the notion of the first glimpse that many visitors will get of a place that may be being visited for the first time is via a live video link from the very plane in which they are sitting, rather than actually seeing it first-hand through the little window - I am reminded of the Leunig cartoon of a man sitting inside watching a scene of the sunset on his T.V. as the very same scene is being played out in real life outside his window.



Some sitting....some snoozing..jetlag....



Well, we are falling asleep here, as evidenced by the photo of the kids taken at about 4 o'clock local time, so it is probably time to wrap this one up. Gave up and went to bed. Now refreshed for new adventure...London eye and tower bridge. Will post photos when Patrick teaches us how.  Love Higgins clan.  xx