Safely back in the UK but...!

Once more we had an excellent overnight flight back from Toronto to London Gatwick and we both actually managed a fair bit of sleep on the plane. We whizzed through the automatic passport gates and our luggage appeared very quickly. So far, so good.

Our original plan had been to take the Gatwick Express train to central London and stay the night there as I had a "leaving do" to attend this evening for a colleague with whom I'd worked at the Royal College of Ophthalmologists some years ago. We then planned to meet a cousin of my Editor (based just outside of London) for lunch tomorrow before taking a late afternoon train to Newcastle.

However several days ago we became aware of rail strikes in the UK today and tomorrow. This meant that the "leaving do" has been postponed for 2 weeks and the cousin is unable to get into the centre tomorrow.

Fortunately we'd been able to pre-book alternative transport from Gatwick to Kings Cross - using a bus to Heathrow airport then a tube train (still running!) from there. However, we'd left a 4-hour gap between our flight arrival time and the bus booking (in case of flight delays) and the buses were so busy that we weren't able to bring that forward. Never mind, we managed to fill the time reading and eating and we're now in our hotel in London. There's only a very much reduced train service to Newcastle tomorrow so we're staying an extra night here and taking a train home on Sunday.