Oops

What was I saying about how I'm pleasantly surprised when things work the way they're supposed to?  Yeah, got a voice mail message (at, I don't know, a dollar a second) which needed an immediate response.  Twenty minutes of dicking around with the phone, my MagicJack, and various cables ... the phone call is unmade and I owe the hotel an apology.  Honestly, though, the MagicJack was behaving and it was a (rare?) case of Problem Existing Between Keyboard and Chair.  Part of me actually thought, "You know, if I had my screwdriver kit here, I could fix this."  Conveniently, the absence of my fix-it kit made cooler heads prevail -- the remedy will be a very sheepish "stupid American" admission of guilt at the front desk on the way out tomorrow.  (I'm still not entirely certain HOW I managed something this stupid.  Let's just say that the next time I take a phone cable out of both the phone and the wall, I won't assume both ends are the same.  Idiot.)  Besides, I damn near knocked the very-breakable-looking lamp off the nightstand while messing around back there -- which was a clear sign I should leave everything well enough alone and let the hotel deal with my stupidity in the morning.  I tried sending an e-mail to what appears to be the contact address for the person who called me ... if that doesn't work, I'll have opportunities to (more cautiously) re-attempt the MagicJack experiment in hotel rooms across Europe.  (Hopefully not leaving a trail of broken phone lines behind me.)


ANYWAY, today was a very nice day, setting aside the Unfortunate MagicJack Incident (and my father nearly doing a header down the stairs).  After a good sleep-in and breakfast, we headed out to the RAF museum in London.  This was actually quite impressive -- lots of aircraft on display (largely WWI and WWII); a whole building devoted to the Battle of Britain; a simulator ride or two.  It was pretty cool.  Here's my folks standing in front of a, er, plane.

(Yeah, we're gonna have to have words with the automatic settings on my camera.  Dad's shirt:  yellow.  The plane:  not so much.)

THEN, after a brief stop back at the hotel, we went off to have dinner and see a musical (Sondheim's Road Show).  While I'd never seen the show before, I was actually somewhat more interested in the theatre itself -- the Menier Chocolate Factory.  It's a very small theatre (I guess it's the English equivalent of Off-Broadway) which has put together some incredibly well-received productions (which have made it across the Atlantic).  So I was pleased to finally see a show there.  Besides -- perhaps because the place really is a former chocolate factory, their restaurant did a divine warm chocolate brownie.


And that's about it for the London part of this journey -- we're catching a plane for Warsaw tomorrow morning.  (Goodbye free internet.)  (Oh.  Yay!  My email made it where it had to go.)  The adventure is about to get rather more adventurey.  For now, at least, we're accustomed to the time change, and we managed to cram two shows, a scenic walk, and a museum into a day and a half.  Not bad.