Day 1 17 Mar 2006 Jerez to London Flight

Left the house at 0730 and arrived at Jerez Airport around 0810 and parked at the long term parking lot. No early check-ins though because the departing flights get processed 2 hours prior and we were an hour early. Since these are budget flights, it's first come, first served and open seating so we have to be in front of the line as soon as the counter opens up. Very strict with the baggage limits: 1 check-in max. 15 k. and 1 carry-on max 10 k. One family which tried to check in with excessive baggage and didn't want to pay were denied the flight. The father was really mad and yelling at the employees while the mom was crying.

Passengers boarded the plane in two groups: 1-99 and then 100-189 so everyone started lining up as soon as they got to the departure gate. We were there early so we were at the front of the line. We picked the seats by the emergency doors so we had plenty of legroom.

The flight left on time and we also found out that the regular creature comforts such as in-flight snacks, music/video is not provided. The seats do not recline but are comfortable enough for a 2.5 hour flight. Most of the passengers brought their own snacks and moved around the cabin. There was a group of about 8 guys that were loud and I had to turn back a couple of times to ask them to quiet down but otherwise, it was an uneventful flight.

Arrived on time at London Stansted Airport, went through customs and then proceeded to the lower level to catch the express train to Liverpool Station. The train was just leaving and we had our on line reservation print-out stamped as our round trip ticket. Only took about 35 minutes to get to downtown London. Bought one-way tickets for the Metro and boarded the underground train to Lancaster Gate which was about a 10-minute walk to our hotel and it's near Kensington and Hyde Parks.

Central Park Hotel was recently renovated and the room was nice even though there was no chest of drawers for our clothes. There was an open closet to hang our clothes but we pretty much kept our clothes in our luggage. We were at the sixth floor so we had a view of the surrounding buildings. The heater was working great too so our room was warm. I was reading customers' comments about their hotel accomodations and the most common was small and cold rooms.

Walked to Queensway avenue about a block away were we had Chinese food for dinner. This was the main shopping area for the hotels and there were plenty of restaurants and souvenir shops and also the Whiteley shopping mall. Mom got her London Starbucks coffee mug and also bought a bottle of bagoong from a Filipino store. We didn't stay out very long because it was very cold and the wind started blowing hard so we just returned to the hotel and watched TV.