POD
The last three days I have been summing up the things I experienced in my two weeks in London. In the meantime I spent nine hours on Friday flying to Chicago and two hours after a two hour delay, arriving in Swannanoa at 6 a.m. London time, exhausted.
On Thursday Richard and I decided to leave Lili a day early and to spend our last night, Thursday, at a hotel at Heathrow so he could be sure that no strike or train cancellation would prevent him from getting to the airport on time. All we did on Thursday was to get tested negative for Covid and then take the long Piccadilly underground ride to Heathrow. Chris, Richard’s wife, had found and booked the hotel and also booked our one adventure of the day, getting from Terminal 5 at Heathrow to the Thistle hotel by pod.
The Thistle Hotel was about a half mile from the airport on the other side of a busy highway. To get to the hotel we were directed to a pod station in the airport where three pods were docked without a human in sight. We touched a screen, were asked by a disembodied voice where we wanted to go, touched Thistle and then were directed to get into the pod whose door opened up for us. Inside we sat on one of the two facing seats, were told to push the button to close the door and another button to start and off we went silently along a little track passing another returning Pod on the way. High in the air we curved this way and that, crossed the highway and after about five minutes pulled into another station where we were told to get out. We followed signs to a gate, were checked by camera and the gate was remotely opened for us. We walked to the hotel where there were humans to sign us in. That was the big event of the day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 