We flew from London to Toronto today. We were told that we would have to clear both Canadian and US customs and board the plane in about an hour and 15 minutes. We rushed through to the Canadian Customs only to find out we were misled. We moved onto US Customs where the line was pretty slow.

Despite our challenges, we made it to our second plane without any trouble. I even had a bit of time to pick up a bottle of scotch from the duty free in Toronto.

We are in a newish Air Canada Airbus with a touch screen TV, emPower, and a USB port to recharge. The TV provides on-demand programming (movies and TV) and games. The power doesn't require an inverter as it boasts a standard plug.

Saturday was a pretty easy-going day. I got up at about 7:30 and had a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal and slipped downstairs at my Uncle and Aunt's place to check email, post a blog post, and upload a few photos to flickr.

We decided that we walk into town to a used bookstore. We brought my little second cousin, who is five, along with us on the walk. Paula bought a very old copy of Emma that will be added to our small collection of interesting objects.

It was a great morning.

My Uncle and Aunt arranged a little family reunion where I got to see some of my cousins and another uncle and some of his family.

When we got back to London, we were trying to decide where to go. The Eye? The Science Museum? We decided on the Tower of London.

The Tower is very touristy. The place was packed even during an afternoon over the week. The Tower has been well restored with additional sections being restored while we were there.

The Tower boasts great views of the Thames and the surrounding country. I do think that much of the Tower's displays are too modern. I found myself a little off put by the chrome pipes moving down to plexiglass panels with information about 16th century fabrics or tiles dropping from the ceilings. Projecting video onto Tudor walls was strange. The information was quite interesting but offered in ways that contrasted too heavily with the structure itself.

We traveled by rail back to London yesterday. It was a very pleasant trip on one of the first class carriages. We traveled down the eastern coast and were privy to some terrific views of the ocean and the land close to the ocean. It was quite beautiful until we passed Newcastle after which it was pretty much a normal view of the UK--gentle rolling hills between each of the towns.

I took advantage of the trip to digitize all of our video so far and start the process of encoding it for REVVER. I even managed to use the train's wireless Internet connection to upload a few of them. The wireless was a really nice freebie touch to the first class experience, but the connection was somewhat flakey--for example uploading photos to Flickr was absolutely hopeless. I'll need to catch up when we get back to Colorado although I may try to upload a few later this evening.

Less the 24 hours into our trek, we slept in. Yep, stayed in bed for almost 10 hours. Today we head into London to check into Gray Line tours. We've had great luck with motor coach tours in Belgium, Australia, and Alaska, so I expect we'll continue the tradition.

It is almost midnight here, and we had a full day. Despite sleeping in we saw much of downtown London. We took a bus to the Tube and took the Tube to Victoria station where we booked a tour to Stonehenge and Bath on Wednesday.

Today we went to Buckingham Palace and then took a walk through St. James Park. The park was quite lovely, lots of geese and duck. In the park we had a nice ice cream and a chocolate muffin. At the far end of the park we saw the seat of the military and then kept on walking to Jewel Tower--part of the original Westminster Palace. It was built in 1365 and while it is small is quite wonderful to see.

I am not good at sleeping on planes. After the horrible events in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC a number of years ago I simply stopped sleeping on planes. I don't feel nervous or uncomfortable but, at best, I fitfully drop in and out of a light doze. The flight from O'Hare to Heathrow was no different. I perhaps got two or three hours of bad sleep.