A day and a half later we finally arrived in Leicester. After walking all over Schipol yesterday, from shop to shop and from cafe to cafe, I think we pretty much covered the entire airport. (For those of you who are technologically curious, my laptop is an Apple Mac with a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2 G RAM — I prefer the 15" display since it's large enough to work with but small enough to travel with; I think the 17" is just too unwieldy.) Unlike Memphis, we had a good dinner (pasta), prepared with simple and fresh ingredients. We flew the last 1.25 hr from Amsterdam to Birmingham in business class. We were split up and I think Core had the better seat with more legroom. I was right up against the bulkhead so a little cramped. The light snack, consisting of ham-wrapped goat cheese and three little fruit mousse balls gave us enough sustenance to stay awake for the car ride to Leicester. Had we arrived earlier we would have taken the bus/train to Leicester, which we thought would have cost us about £30. As it was, the A2B service cost me another £20. Oh well, at least it was door to door. After we unpacked, we went downstairs to relax with a glass of Guinness for Core and a Caffreys for me.
Our first room was ok to sleep in but this morning we found absolutely no cold water pressure in the bathroom. The hot water wasn't flowing terribly quickly either, so I ended up having a bath in a bout 4 inches of water. Pathetic. There was not enough pressure to drive the shower head, and what there was was scaldingly hot anyway, so a normal shower was impossible. Worst hotel plumbing I've seen in years. Corey had to skip a shower altogether and after a full day and a half in transit she was not happy. Breakfast helped, but what really improved my mood was the hotel bumping us up to a better hotel room after a brief, calm inquiry as to why the previous room lacked water pressure. I guess they know that floor requires remodeling. They said that the new(ish) room was on a floor where they had recently remodeled. Hotel room v2.0 is much better. I have a little "executive" desk for the slaptop and Corey just sung out of the bathroom that the shower is "normal" and hence acceptable. Now all we need is an iron and ironing board and we should be all set.
Back at Schipol I finally found a really cool power adapter for European (actually global) electrical outlets. It's that cylindrical black thing in the picture to which I plugged in my traveling extension cord. It's not a voltage converter, so it won't step down the European 240 V but it has all the wall plug prongs all in one neat little package. You just slide out whichever prongs you want to plug in. On the back side it has outlet holes for any plug making it truly universal. Luckily, most of the electronics gizmos that I travel with have their own power converters so that you can plug them in to either US 120 V or European 240 V outlets and they'll step the voltage appropriately. I charged up my laptop and cell phone this way last night so the adapter appears to be working as expected. Finally someone designed this little appliance correctly. The other one that I carry around in is this clunky box to which you have to snap on the various prong extensions. Which means you have to carry all of them in a little vinyl bag. Most annoying since these things stick out all over the place, puncturing everything including the little travel bag itself. I'm so happy with this new "Swiss universal adapter" that I think I'll buy another one on the way home.
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