The morning of Monday, July 9 th, Josh and I had to leave Bob’s Bed and Breakfast because we were running out of cash. With only credit left, we needed to move to a place that would let us pay with a credit card. Josh found a place online in Stratford and had secured it for four nights online with a deposit. We left Bob’s place and took the bus to the Mill Hill Underground station. Oyster passes in hand, we get on the train for the 40 minute ride to Stratford. Keep in mind that Josh has had hernia surgery only three days before and now he’s dragging about 70 pounds of luggage with him. I, too, am dragging luggage as well. The path to Stratford required taking the Northern Line south to Tottingham Court Road, changing trains to the Central line and getting off at Stratford. I’m not really sure how the disabled get around London on the Underground because there was a complete lack of elevators, or lifts. Looking at the Underground map, most of the handicap accessible stops are on the DLR line, at the Heathrow Airport stops or near the end of each line. I’m going to guess that it’s because the outermost stops have been added in the last few years and were designed with lifts and the disabled in mind. The stops that make up most of London’s Underground pre-date the laws requiring accessibility for the handicapped and thus are all stairs. We have to carry all our luggage up the stairs or down the stairs to get to the platform to catch the correct train because there wasn’t a single elevator to be found. Josh would have a hard time healing with all this exertion.

The Stratford train stop was a bustle of activity. Many busses stopped there as well as the trains. There was a mall, The Stratford Center, across the street from the stop and there were hundreds of people going into and out of the mall to cut across to Broadway. This was quite the hub of activity in Stratford. With the University of East London just up the road, the place was a flurry of college-aged kids.

Broadway turned into Romford Road , which was where Josh said our new place would be. He thought the address was 47 Romford Road so we set off in that direction. According to the map he had, the hotel should be between The Grove and Water Street . The only things between those two streets were solicitors (attorney’s offices) or university buildings. And, 47 Romford doesn’t exist. Both Josh and I go into several places asking the locals if they know where we can find the London Stratford Hotel. No one has ever heard of it, including the other hotel owners in the area. My patience, which I don’t have much of, is running extremely low and Josh needs to not be pulling luggage all over bloody London. A couple of Bobbies tell him that they’ve never heard of it but think that maybe he’s confused it with the Ibis Hotel on the corner of Broadway and The Grove. I’m convinced that we don’t have a reservation there because it’s a pretty nice hotel and the rate Josh said he got online would make that quite a steal, indeed. We didn’t not have a reservation there as expected but they did have an internet kiosk in the lobby that on which we could buy time.. Josh bought a 30 minutes worth of time (the smallest amount) and preceded to look up his email account for the confirmation information of the hotel. The computer is extremely out of date and is not running several programs that the 21st century internet considers standard, like Java and Flash. We can’t get into his email account because the computer won’t run a program allowing him to see it. More money wasted. Josh sends a scathing email to the “contact us” address listed for the service that puts the kiosks in hotel's lobbies. I tell him that we should just go down to the Starbucks that we saw and log on there. We’ll look up the information, he can go get us settled in the new hotel and I can get some work done.

At the loudest Starbucks on the planet, we log on to the internet and are faced with three really bad choices for internet service: one hour, 24 hours consecutively or a month. There’s no “pay as you go” option, there’s no weekly option. It’s an hour, a day or a freaking month. Figuring that we’d be in the area for the next four days and realizing that the best value for the money is the monthly option we go for that one. Its $80 or 40 pounds. I don’t even pay that much for my cell phone and home DSL service combined. We’re between a rock and a hard place, though, and the purchase is made. Reason Number 2,356 why Starbucks sucks. Josh’s email comes right up, he gets the info and leaves me to work at the world’s loudest Starbucks. That would be the one at The Stratford Center in Stratford , London , UK , right next to the McDonald’s and the KFC. Josh comes back about an hour and a half later. I was starting to get worried that he laid down on the bed and fell asleep. Anyway, he says that when he got to the hotel, it was actually 43 Romford Road and it was the Stratford, which was really just a flat (townhouse) that reminded Josh of a tenement house. We had walked right past it. But the best part is that their credit card machine was broken and they wanted cash only.

Josh was able to convince the guy that since he made his deposit online with his credit card that he should be able to pay for the room with his credit card. The hotel clerk said that Josh would have to wait and talk to the manager who would be back after six pm. Once Josh got back to the loudest Starbucks on the planet and saw that I was making headway on my work, we got down to the business of figuring out what to do. I said, "there's always Blackpool."

My stepmother, Carol, is from Blackpool, England, a lovely little coastal town on the western side of England, right on the Irish Sea. Her sister, Joanie, lives there still with her husband Dave along with her son Karl and his family. I'd sort of been in touch with them regarding being in England for the week but wasn't expecting too much to come of it. After Josh returned from yet another cash only experience, I stepped up my communications with Blackpool to see about a visit.

There was much deliberation going on via the internet seeing as how we did not have much in the way of phone service. I had internet phone, Skype, but it wasn't working very well in the loudest Starbucks on the planet. I was only able to make a few calls from time to time when the internet connection was strong. Other than that, we had no phones. Josh decided to go over to the train station and see about tickets to Blackpool on the National Rail. Although Stratford Station was on the National Rail line, if we were to go to Blackpool that night, we'd have to get to the Euston Station to take the train northwest out of London. Meanwhile, I'm having email conversations with Joanie and her son Karl about coming up to Blackpool.

Karl has some friends that just recently bought a hotel and thought he might be able to get us a deal on the room. He just needed to know our parameters: how long were we staying, etc... After we got through all of that, Karl was able to negotiate a stunning deal, the details of which will remain undisclosed, in a spectacular hotel in a room with an ocean view. The catch: no credit card machine so they could only take cash. Josh and I just chuckled. We made it clear that we didn't have any cash but that we would love to come to Blackpool as London was leaving a bad taste in our mouths. Needless to say, we were able to work out a situation that was amiable to everyone so we decided to get our stuff from the tenement house and go to Blackpool instead.

We had to dash, though, because the last trains of the night were leaving around 8:30pm and we still had to take the Tube to Euston Station. And, as another example of how the sidewalks roll up in London early, we got kicked out of the loudest Starbucks on the planet at a whopping 7pm. This one was next to a university, too. Anyway, Josh grabs the gear he took with him to the tenement house, I'm waiting for him inside The Stratford Center and soon we are off to buy the tickets. When Josh spoke earlier with the man (I wasn't there), Josh said that the tickets were good for any train trip back for a month. As long as we took our return trip from Blackpool before August 9th, we'd be okay. Thankfully, the National Rail system was taking credit and Josh bought us two tickets to paradise (aka Blackpool) for 130 pounds ($260). The guy kept saying that we'd need to hurry to make the 8:30 train and we agreed but he kept on talking about this and that and the other thing. Eventually he shut up and we zipped around the corner. The best path for us to take was the Stratford Station (where we were) west on the Central line to the Bank Station, get onto the Northern Line and take it to Euston Station. From there we could go right to the National Rail Station. Bank was the worst of the transfers. Four different Underground lines meet there for transfers. The signage isn't all that good as well. It assumes that one kind of knows where to go. We had to stumble around looking for a sign to tell us how to get to the northbound Northern Line. Once we found it, it was up two flights of stairs...with heavy luggage...with a man who had surgery three days before. Josh was hurting and I couldn't do anything to help him. We did make the train however and zipped off to Euston Station.