Off to an interesting start

Well we took off for Europe on Friday, May 18th.  The day started kind of crazy as all of us were up until 1am the night before take off packing and taking care of last minute things.  Then we all worked full days before leaving straight for the airport. 

My friend Jessica met me at my house where my roomie Molly was driving us up to meet our other friend, Tina.  As we are heading out the door, I was telling Molly my awesome story of forgetting my Driver's License the frist time I went to Las Vegas with some friends.  We got an hour into the drive, in the middle of Riverside, and had to turn around and go back for my ID.  Not my finest moment.  I made sure that I had my passport this time before I left for the airport.  We get about 3 minutes from the house when someone mentions something about an ID.  I fumbled through my stuff, realizing I had completely forgot my license, so we turned around and I proceed to race up my stairs to grab this.  Sure enough, it's sitting safely in my wallet, right where I left it.  That could have potentially been a disaster since I am the one driving over here and without a license, can't do that.  Once that was resolved, we were on our way. 

I was on a seperate flight from my friend, Tina and Jessica, so the plan was to meet at the Budget Rental Car location in Terminal 3 in Heathrow.  It's a massive airport so we figured that would be the easiest.  I was scheduled to arrive about 30 minutes before them so I told them I'd head to their terminal, which was 3 and wait for them. 

In flight, I meet these two women who live in Santa Barbara, so we started chatting about that.  We took off out of the plane together and headed for Customs.  We're waiting in line and as were chatting decide to snap a picture together.  Apparently, this is not allowed in Customs....I've done this in other countries and it wasn't a problem, but here, not so much.  The Customs woman came over and was not happy with us, having us delete the pictures.  She also wanted to see what else was on my camera before that.  There wasn't anything as I had just cleared my camera before leaving and I told her that, but she didn't seem to believe me and was getting a bit more frustrated with me and telling to go back.  I told her the same thing as nicely as possible as I did not want to spend the next 2 hours being interogated by Customs.  Great way to enter the country by being yelled at while in line to enter.  Finally she left us alone.  Next it was on to get me passport stamped.  The woman was very nice, but kept asking bunches of questions.  Once through Customs, we grabbed our stuff, said our goodbyes, wished each other trips, and I was on my way to meet my friends. 

My flight ended up being delayed upon leaving so I arrived 35 minutes later than planned.  I figured that my friends would be there in our designated location because they should have landed at the same time I ended up landing, plus I had to work my way to their Terminal, which in Heathrow is a 15-20minute ordeal.  I got there, and nothing.  There's no one there.  So I sat down and waited.  They should have landed around 3:45pm.  I was sitting there for a while and around 5:30pm when they were not there, I went to find out if they landed.  Sure enough, they had landed at 3:45pm as scheduled.  Did we get our wires crossed and was I supposed to meet them somewhere else?  I was going off of very little sleep so perhaps I misunderstood.  I decided to suck it up and try to call one of them...found out my phone doesn't work over here.  So now what?  I had that thought that this might be another St. Thomas fiasco where these same friends and I and another friend were meeting up in St. Thomas and flights were delayed, wires were crossed, and we all eventually ended up meeting up like 6 hours later than planned.  Luckily this did not end up being the case.  Finally I spotted them and I guess they were put in 2 Customs lines as one of my friends is a US citizen and one is a Mexico citizen.  My friend Jessica got to go in the "special line" and ended up waiting over an hour longer than Tina to get through.  What a pain.  At least we found each other and were on our way to pick up the rental car.

We arrive at Avis/Budget and I give the nice lady my name.  "Oh, miss, we have that you were supposed to pick it up at 5am this morning."  Excuse me?  I just looked at my friends and started laughing.  This really was not turning out to be my day.  We all just laughed and there was nothing that could be done, so instead of getting the type of car we prepaid for, as there were none available, she checked and we ended up with the next size up.  That was a good investment for us as it was a small 2 door Fiat with just enough room for 3 of us and our 3 bags.  We were wondering what in the world the other size would have been.  We got in, I tested out the stick with the L hand while driving on the L side of the road, on the L side of the car.  Different, but doable.  Needless to say, once all that excitment happened we were on our way to Oxford, our first stop for the trip.