Calgary, Heathrow, Frankfurt

Calgary Tower
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Today was a waiting game. We were scheduled to fly out of Calgary for Heathrow at about 8pm. We had a good sleep in and checked out of the hotel at midday, stowing the luggage with the Bell Captain. We asked the Concierge before we left for a good place for brunch and he recommended a place called Avenue Diner just one street away.

There is a lot of constuction going on in the area of the hotel. As we walk towards our destination our eyes are drawn to the skyline by the Calgary Tower. It looks like a smaller version of the Seattle tower. We wonder about whether it has a viewing platform but our bellies are more convincing for us to keep going and get something to eat. Inside the diner it looks like a modern take on an old diner - very chic looking and the patrons are all business people from the surrounding area.

One long day equals two short days

Art Sculpture in Calgary Mall
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I order a version of eggs benedict and Joe decides to skip breakky and go straight for lunch. He orders the daily special - a smoked turkey sourdough sandwich, which comes with his choice of potato salad, green salad or soup - which being cream of asparagras had no chance of being chosen! We are delivered huge glasses of water with lemon wedge and cherry, and offered coffee or tea. We have learned to ask for tea as generally the coffee is not good.

After brunch we just wander through the Calgary pedestrian mall, going in and out of shops of interest. One shop we are in Joe gets talking to the sales assistant who ends up suggesting a good place to stay when he returns to go skiing early next year. I tried on some clothes in a couple of places and made a purchase or two. We stop at about 3:30pm for a coffee at a place called Tim Hortons - which does a lot of advertising on tv. We order coffee, which comes out of one of those auto-dispensing machines, and grab two american style donuts. I just had to do that as we were about to leave the North American continant and couldn't do so without trying one of their donuts. They lived up to my expectation which was not that great.

We eventually wound our way back to the hotel and picked up our bags and were off to the airport in a taxi. Check-in was easy and up to the lounge we went to wait for about 2hrs for our flight. This left on time and was much more comfortable than our trip from Oz to Hawaii. We were sitting in British Airways Club World seats which are very much line the Qantas Skybeds. The dinner service was good and we both settled down to watch a movie called Next starring Nicholas Cage. After this I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer and slept fitfully for the remainder of the 8hr30min flight until the continental breakky was served just before landing.

At Heathrow it was a mad house as we made our way with the throng of people to terminal 1, then joined the "muster" at the security checkpoint. Here we wait in a very crowded line, before we glimse a fasttrack line for British Airways Club World passengers. We move over to this line which although shorter, seems to take much longer than the normal line. We finally make it through and find the air lounge for our 2hr30min wait for the flight. I'm feeling rat-shit and decide to take a shower and then Joe decided to do the same. We find that our flight is delayed for 30mins due to bad weather and high winds at Heathrow. We finally depart at about 4:30pm (we gained 8hrs somewhere over the atlantic), for the short flight to Frankfurt. We are served afternoon tea, which is more like a dinner service with pot pie, sandwiches, rasberry slice and fruit scones with jam and cream.

On arrival at Frankfurt we manage to pick the slowest immigration line, and finally get through, walking straight through customs with no waiting. We are pleased to find a Globus sign with our name on it in the arrivals lounge and get chaufferred to our hotel in a very nice Mercedes Benz. We get our first glimse of a very overcast Germany, where every other car you see is an Audi or Mercedes Benz. We are both feeling the jet lag and on check-in decide we had had enough food for the day and just relaxed in our room for the night.