New Title???

As anyone who tries to be a regular reader knows, I haven't been putting much up here lately. That is mainly because I really haven't gone anywhere. I did a quick trip to London last week, more on that in a little bit, and I have quite a few travels coming up soon. But after that, my extensive galavanting of the world will come to a pretty abrupt end as I move into a new job. So, that begs the question, if I am in Bonn 90% of the time, does "Where in the world is Paul?" make sense? If anyone has any ideas, drop a comment.

Getting back to my last trip though... It is one of the cool things about Bonn, you can literally go to London for the day just as if you were living in Trenton NJ and went into Philadelphia for the day. There is a 9 AM flight over and then the option of a 3:15 or 7:20 flight back. The flight over is just an hour and with the time difference you basically arrive the same time as you left giving you a good 5 - 9 hours in town depending on your return.

As this was a Friday, I really wanted to get back as early as possible and only had a 4 hour meeting scheduled, which was just short enough to book the early return. Now the drawback to this plan is you have to fly into Heathrow, one of the worst and busiest airports in the world. It all started to go south when we got into London Airspace and the pilot announced we were going into a holding pattern. After flying around in circles for an hour, we finally landed. At this point I knew it was hopeless to think about catching my flight back so I switched to the later flight. I had my meeting and then went back to the airport early to avoid London traffic. A good plan since the lounge is decent and there are some good bookstores to pick up something to read. The plan was thwarted by the fact that the plane to take me back had been flying between Bonn and Heathrow all day, thus picking up more and more delays as the day went on. After about an hour and a half delay, we finally left at 9:00.

Moral of the story, Avoid Heathrow at all costs!