After getting through customs and picking up our checked luggage we started working out what to do from there. We didn't really know where we were going, but we did know that we needed a bus to get there. Kevin went to get us bus tickets while I headed off to find a place to exchange money. After I'd found a machine to give me some pounds and he'd bought the rather expensive bus tickets, we headed out of the terminal and down to where the bus would pick us up. That expensive part is to become a trend; London aint cheap folks.
As we walked to the area where all the busses came Kevin told me about how unhelpful the ticket lady was in telling (or rather not telling) him what stop we wanted to get off. Apparently he told her what we knew about where we were going and she wouldn't or couldn't tell him which stop we wanted, so he just had to pick one based on what he could tell from the map she had. He said she was pretty rude about it, too.
When the bus arrived to pick us up around 12:30, the guy loading luggage asked us what stop we were getting off at so he could know where to put our stuff on the bus. Kevin couldn't remember the stop name that he had picked, so he told the guy the hostel we were looking for or the underground stop near it. The driver named some other stop that wasn't the one Kevin had picked, but we had no clue where we were going so we took his word for it and got on the bus.
After an hour or so we came to a stop called Finchley Road. Kevin thought that was the one he had chosen when buying the tickets. He wasn't positive if it was the right one though, and he didn't seem at all convinced of it to me. I didn't know if we wanted to risk getting off there if it might put us far away from where we wanted to be. In the time we took discussing it the bus started going again. We stayed on until we came to Marble Arch, the stop that the bus driver had told us we wanted.
Turns out Finchley Road would not have been that great, and Marble Arch was even worse. The bigger issue facing us, however, was the fact that we had hoped to take the London Tube from this point on but it was not running that late at night. Our backup plan was to take one of the city busses. We knew those busses were overpriced, but at least they could get us where we needed to go. When we tried to board a bus, however, we found that they required exact change. Right. The only British money we had was the £50 that I'd gotten from the machine at the airport. There was no way we could make exact bus change out of that, and the driver didn't seem too keen on cutting us a break. And there were no stores open anywhere to get change. So we were left with walking across London.To make matters worse, we also had no real map of London with us. All we had was the Tube map included in Rick Steves' London guide and the few hand-drawn lines that he squiggled on one page of his book which somewhat resembled a very high-level map. Rick certainly could have included a better map in his few-hundred-page book, but that probably wouldn't help out the sales of his line of maps of European cities, now would it? One should note, at this point in the story, that the map of the London Underground is basically useless for navigation above ground. It tells you which line to take to get to which station, but the lines do not actually indicate at all what the streets above them do, or even what direction the subterranean tunnels actually take. Just try to match up the official tube map to an actual map of the city and you'll see what I mean. Kevin and I both much prefer the NYC subway maps for this reason.
The two of us have done our best to reconstruct the journey that we went on that night. It might not be absolutely accurate, but we feel it's at least pretty darn close. You've seen the route we should have taken, which Google tells us is almost 4 miles. I can assure you that this is not the route we actually took. Bear in mind also that we were lugging 2 weeks' worth of luggage with us this whole time. That amounted to 1 huge suitcase, 2 small suitcases, my backpack, and Kevin's messenger bag.
The actual route we took was more like what you see on the right (click it for a larger version.) Measuring it out with the Google Earth ruler Kevin estimates that our route was 6.47 miles. I'd say we did pretty good considering the fact that we were working with a Tube map, a few bus route maps in bus stops along the way, and the compass I'd brought with me. Along the way we were yelled at by some drugged up guy at a bus station. We didn't even say anything to him. I think he wanted us to give him more drugs or something. As we passed by him he yelled that something was going to get us around the next corner. He kept yelling at us until we were more than a block away.Later on our walk, a cab pulled up to me and the driver yelled for me to come over to him. Kevin was too far ahead at this point to have been a part of the conversation. Remember when you were a little kid and adults always told you not to go over to men who called you over to their cars? That's the instinct that came to my mind at this moment.
I figured worst case scenario he had a gun or a knife or something and that would be bad. More likely, I assumed he wanted to charge us to get in his cab or take advantage of us in some other way. I mean, I didn't ask him for any help. I was just walking along in a manner which to outside viewers might seem like I knew where I was going and had every intention of getting there quickly. I didn't really want to risk getting into whatever scam this guy might be trying to pull, so I kept walking. After that he pulled up again and yelled something like "You're an ignorant fella, aren't ya?" Well maybe I was a bit too paranoid and maybe he just wanted to give us some directions or advice or a winning lottery ticket for all I know, but gimme a break I was tired.
After some more walking we passed by a bar where some women were standing outside laughing and making fun of me as we carried all our stuff by them. At this point my love of London and its lovely citizens was truely blossoming.
By this time it was getting quite late and the heavy luggage seemed heavier than ever. After walking a few miles across London, all the while being lost and arguing about where we should be going, we were getting quite cranky too. Specifically this was the corner where we got the most cranky. We'll just leave it at that.
Later, we came across a gas station that was actually open in the middle of the night. We went up to it and tried to buy a map so we could figure out where the hell we were going. The convenience store part of it wasn't really open to go in that late, so we had to talk to the guy there through some glass. You know, how gas stations are at night when they just have the window open so you can pay for the gas. He didn't have any maps of London. That's right, a gas station in London which did not have any maps of London. All he had was a really expensive book of maps. We couldn't really look at that through the glass very well. We kinda got some directions from him, but he didn't seem too sure about it to me. I'm not really sure what he said entirely though, he was hard to hear and Kevin was the one talking to him.
We did finally run in to a cab driver who was helpful in giving us directions to get us heading back in the right direction. That was around the top of that map where our little red line does a hard left turn. Kevin thinks we were already kinda back on track from the gas station guy's directions, but I'm not so sure.
By the time we dragged ourselves into the hostel it was something like 5 AM. We checked in and the guy knew who we were without even looking at his computer or anything. The guys working there were kinda odd like that the whole time we were there. They always seemed to know just a little too much about us. The guy working at this hour knew that we were two guys who were checking in and staying two nights.
He also wanted us to pay for our entire stay up front and in cash. The hostel cost us more than £50 for the 2 nights that we stayed there, and you'll remember that all we had was the £50 that I grabbed at the airport. Of course, they wouldn't let us pay with a credit card. Thankfully, he did let us pay what we had for the night and we told them we'd pay the rest the next day.
We went up to our room and crashed.
