London?

Yes, here we are in London! What a goofy first day we've had.

Evil Lufthansa overbooked our flight -  just as we got up to the ticket counter they ran out of seats. Two of us were ticketed; four of us weren't. After much hand-wringing, we agreed to accept their compensation vouchers and show up for the next day's flight - and likely to miss our day in Naples and Pompeii. Meanwhile, our baggage continued on to Rome without us (isn't that like illegal or something?)

Since our luggage was gone anyway, Dale started working the counters. He got us first on the stand-by list to London on British Airways with a guaranteed connecting flight to Rome on Alitalia. Lufthansa wrote us the transfer tickets but forgot to ask us to hand back in our voucners.

If a ticketed passenger would fail to show by 45 minutes before departure, we would get the seats. So at 60 minutes before departure, guess how many seats they had? SIX! They began the ticketing process, gave us some stand-by gate passes and sent us down Concourse A. Well, noboby showed and the seats were assigned to us! The last six seats on the 777 plane! We love BA!!

We left Denver at about 9:00 p.m. and had an uneventful flight. We've got quite a bit of time to kill here in London - yet not enough to leave the airport and actually see anything.

Thankfully, we will not miss our Pompeii trip on Monday, which was the cause of a lot of handwringing back in Denver. Plus, we made out like bandits with the Lufthansa vouchers. Looks like we were well-paid for our delay and will have all the spending money we need and more for the entire trip. WAY TO GO, DALE!

Can't post photos at this funky internet station here at the airport. Will try to do that when we get to Rome.

Ciao!