Peregrinations

As promised, here's the program for the next few weeks for us.

Beast's brother is arriving at some point today so that he is in the area in case there is a problem with FIL while we're gone. BIL and Sparky will be baching it, which isn't all that terrifying; should be an interesting couple of weeks for Sparky. And BIL.

About the trip itself, we leave Tuesday afternoon for London, arriving there at 6 a.m. local time. We have a full 6 hours to make it through customs, find and buy tickets for the following week's bus trip to Leicester, go back through security for Alitalia and find our flight to Rome. I don't really expect any of that to be difficult.

We arrive in Rome at about 3:30 local time. Allowing time for customs, again, and all the rest of the arrival things, I'm hoping to be at the hotel (Starhotel Michelangelo) by 6 or so. We'll probably have a lovely early-for-Italy dinner and crash and burn, although maybe not. It will feel like early afternoon for us. Maybe we'll walk around to the Trevi to tire ourselves out enough to sleep; it's supposed to be lovely at night.

We'll be in Rome till the 16th when we'll take the train up to Florence for the next few nights. We'll stay in Florence at the Hotel California (I am not kidding), very near the Duomo and pretty much everything else worth seeing. We'll be there till the 20th when we take the train back to Rome and make our way to an airport hotel.

The next day, April 21, we head back to London, arriving at about 3:45 local time. The bus will take us north to Leicester where we will somehow end up at our hotel there. The wedding is at the town hall near the hotel, the reception is about a block from the hotel, and the train station is around the corner. That is quite handy because on Easter Sunday we will be taking the train from Leicester back to London St. Pancras where we'll either use the tube or catch a cab to the Hotel Indigo chosen for two reasons: it's free using Beast's hotel points, and it's near Paddington station where we will catch the tube to Heathrow the next day. I've never stayed near near Hyde Park and Regent Park, so that will be fun.

Our flight leaves Heathrow at 4:20 p.m. and we have to fly to Washington Dulles and change planes. We arrive there at about 7:30 p.m., go through customs, etc., and then back through security to catch our flight home at 10 which dumps us out at our home airport by 11:30. We'll be scheduling a limo to drive us home because Beast's brother plans to hit the road back to NYC as soon as he knows we've made it to Washington.