Harry Potter in London

Mandy and I are huge Harry Potter fans. When the first movie was coming out we found ourselves living in Italy and not speaking any Italian. It was November 2001. We managed to convince Jeff that it would be a good idea to spend our Thanksgiving weekend traveling to London to see London, but really to see Harry Potter in English.

I was able to book our family a flight from a town less than an hour from our house, directly into London for less the $200 round trip for all three of us. Thank you Ryan. This airline is fabulous, it is like nothing I had ever seen before. You buy your tickets online, that is the only way. You are given a e-ticket. There are no seat assignments, you show up and sit where you want, like a bus. People pile onto the plane and sit down, the plane leaves. Takes about five mintues. They don't give you anything like food or water, instead they sell you stuff the whole flight. Water bottles are about $10 bucks. Just kidding, I don't remember how much it cost, just that we were shocked that it could be so much.

While we were going through the screening process to get onto the plane, this being only a couple short months after Sept. 11, we saw a sweet little old Italian lady being forced to throw her nail scissors in the trash. She was screaming at the Carbenari, his partner had a machine gun and a huge mean dog, this did not stop her from telling him exactly what she thought about having to throw her nail scissors in the trash. Later on the plane, one of the things the flight attendants tried to sell us along the way was nail scissors, just like the ones she had to throw away. I wanted to buy her a pair. I wondered if they took them out of the trash and then re-sell the stuff on the plane?

We were traveling on a budget, as we always do. We found a bread and breakfast, we had to take a train from the airport into London, get on another train and take it all the way out to the last stop on the line, walk six blocks and there we found our bread and breakfast, which was actually just a room in a sweet little old ladies house. Our breakfast actually consisted of a bowl a cereal and some tea. But, it was safe, clean and comfortable-and in our budget.

When I walked into that house I was immediately transported back in time to my grandmother's house. It smelled exactly like my grandma's house. I have never smelled another house that had that smell, I still to this day wonder what it was. My grandma's house was in Seattle, another damp climate and they houses were approximately the same age? I just don't know.

We ended up having a marvelous trip. We took the train back into London. We saw many of the landmarks of London. Spent the day walking and riding trains. We ate wonderful food, and of course we saw our beloved Harry Potter movie. The thing was that Mandy and I hated it, the Harry Potter movie. We loved the books so much that seeing the first movie, after having gone all the way to England for it, we were just so horrified with how extremely mediocre the movie was. The books are just so much and the movie was just ordinary. Since then we have watched it again, and gone to all the other movies, I guess we have gotten over the fact that movies are not books. But, that day, we looked at each other after the movie and I said, it was horrible, and Mandy laughed and said, she thought so too. Jeff on the other hand was horrified, he has not read any of the books and thought the movie was great, he was so upset that we had gone all the way to England to see a movie and then we did not like the movie. We liked London very much though.

Jeff had been stationed in England before Japan and he still had friends living there, they invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner, so we even got to have our Thanksgiving dinner on our trip to England. Jeff's friend is Thai, her mamma actually grew up in Thailand, and she cooked us along with our turkey and all the trimmings, some wonderful Thai food too.

I wish that travel in America was like it is in Europe: planes, trains, cheap and easy.

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I wrote this post for Naomi's England goes Gonzo blog carnival. The carnival kicks off on October 1st.