London: Day Four + Arriving in Sweden

Claudio and I had just one morning left in London before we had to catch our flight to Stockholm, so we wanted to make the most of it.

As we still hadn't managed to ride one of the red buses (I find the tube a lot easier to understand), we decided to just catch one at random and see where it took us. There weren't many people on board, which meant that we could sit in the best seats: right at the front on the top deck! The short journey took us through the West End up to Green Park, and we had great views.

When we got off the bus we discovered a Porsche showroom just across the road. Now, Claudio is a massive car fan, so he was really excited to see it and wondered if there were any more nearby. We searched for Ferrari on Google Maps and discovered that they also had a showroom just round the corner in Berkeley Square. 

We got there and found out that there were also showrooms for Bentley and Bugatti in the same area! Claudio was so happy!

Afterwards, we walked back towards the hotel enjoying the sights of all the designer shops along the way.

Once we arrived in Piccadilly Circus, I took a couple of photos as a reminder of our stay in the area. It had been a great final morning in London.

We arrived back at the hotel entrance in order to check out, and that was when everything started to go wrong...

I reached into my pocket for the little wallet where I was keeping my hotel keycard and the Oyster card I'd borrowed from my dad, only to find that it was gone. It wasn't in my other pocket or in my bag either.

We retraced the entire route that we'd followed that morning, including the part that we'd travelled on the bus, but we weren't able to find it. I realised it had probably fallen out when we were on the bus, so I sent off a lost property form. (In the end, it never showed up, but it turned out there was no money left on the card anyway, so the situation wasn't as bad as I'd thought.)

After I'd bought a new card and Claudio had topped up his, we were finally on our way to Heathrow Airport on the metro. However, the journey took a lot longer than we'd expected, and we arrived there with less than an hour and a half before our flight.

Then when we went through security, we hit another problem. Normally when I travel by plane, I put a suitcase in the hold and take a bag on board with me, but in order to save money this time, we'd chosen to take hand luggage only. For some reason, I'd forgotten this while I was packing, and had put a bunch of liquids in my suitcase and just a neat little transparent bag of liquids in my rucksack, and Claudio had done the same. I didn't realise the mistake until we'd actually reached the front of the queue at security. Obviously the liquids were picked up by the scanning machines, and we had to have our suitcases unpacked in front of everyone and have some of our items thrown away.

After all that, we were running very late and I seriously thought we were going to miss the plane. We hurried through the airport to our gate, expecting it to be closed, but thankfully it was still open. The flight turned out to be quite badly delayed, meaning that we hadn't missed it after all.

Once we had arrived in Stockholm and got off the plane (which was absolutely packed full - so much for British Airway's "social distancing measures"), our problems didn't end there. We had to figure out how to get to our hotel, and it was actually quite difficult. We ended up relying on the advice of Google Maps and taking the Arlanda Express train from the airport to the city centre, which was lethally expensive. Then we needed to take a commuter train to the neighbourhood where we were staying, but it was hard to figure out which train to take, and we accidentally took one going in the wrong direction!

At around 8pm, we finally arrived, exhausted, at our hotel in the Årsta neighbourhood of the city. It was fairly basic and the area wasn't the most attractive, but at least it was cheap and the room was nice and warm. 

It had been one of those disastrous travel days that happen to all travellers occasionally. However, the important thing is that we made it to our destination in the end! And thankfully the rest of our trip went smoothly, and we had an great few days in Stockholm. I'll be blogging about all the amazing places we visited around the city very soon!

Read about London: Day One here, London: Day Two here and London: Day Three here!