I awake to a delightful sunrise over the North Atlantic. The cheap sports watch on my wrist indicates that it’s about 04:30 local time. It seems the drunken revelry has taken its toll - the main cabin is eerily and, judging from my last period of significant wakefulness, unusually silent, save for the noisome drone of Flight itself.
We’re a few hundred miles off Ireland when the cabin crew rattles into action again, rolling my nemesis, Kneebane the Beverage Cart, down the aisle with tins of breakfast. People jolt awake at the prospect of “food” and I receive my tray with only mild trepidation. A granola bar, a microwaved and flattened croissant and a little plastic bowl of FCOJ. Delightful. At least I’ll be hungry in Britain itself.
But soon we land in Merrie Olde England! Oh, finally, European soil! My natural impatience voltrons with neophilic excitement to form an incredible adrenaline rush that has me almost literally bouncing off the walls, straight up until we get to Passport Control. The walk there, I’m glued to the windows on the walkways. The sun is just peeking out of a cloud, and around us are things familiar but yet subtly alien.
“Lorries.” “Transit.”
Fortuitously, Gatwick is somewhat bare at 6 AM, and so immigration is efficient and rapid. My particular processing agent looks strangely like a shorter, older Ben Croshaw, without the sweet hat. He’s just as bitter as well, complaining about having been on shift for 12 hours and yet still performing his job with studied efficiency. It’s a refreshing splash of Britishism to start off this short adventure.
Stowing our group’s luggage in a rented office in LGW itself, we’re shepherded to the Gatwick Express, a cushy - sorry - posh train that runs straight to Victoria station in downtown Westminster. The English countryside is incredibly storybook, just as all our old children’s tales describe pastoral life. Tidily-kept fields separated by low fences, cleared of brush and trees. These form a secondary divider, but are well-confined to their narrow rows between dewy squares of viridian grass. The trees are gnarled and would lend themselves well to youths clambering up their branches. It’s surprising that degree to which it resembles expectations.
Another startling revelation - they serve beer on the train at 7 in the morning. There are, again, many cheers.
Disembarking, we’re given guidance to the front of Buckingham Palace and then set free for four hours in the grey Anglo-dawn. Dissembling into smaller subgroups, I decide to lead mine up The Mall to Trafalgar Square. Getting to the Mall from Buckingham is a little adventure in and of itself. There’s no lights or zebra crossings within a few hundred yards. Being lazy brash and hotheaded Yankees, we decide to perform an Epic and Illegal jaywalk. As luck would have it, we sprint across the macadam in front of two police cars sitting up the road at the red light, and I don’t notice it until I’m already vaulting the black metal fence on the far side of the road. True to form, the coppers drive slowly past and… glare at us in a rather disapproving manner.
Up the Mall, we pass a number of statues and statuesque buildings built over the last several hundred years. One particular statue is a man in bronze, standing atop a thirty-foot column. Curious, I close in for a peek at the plaque affixed to the base. It celebrates the second son of King George III, commander of the British Army from 1775 - 1807 and 1811 - 1827. Bloody British are celebrating burning down Washington. 
Trafalgar Square is enormous and an incredibly complicated traffic zone. I’m surprised that anyone would willingly navigate it in an automobile. Finding a red telephone booth, my group takes turns doing Stupid Tourist Shit with it.
By this point, I’m rather hungry. Being in London and overwhelmed by the weight of the British Empire’s thousand years at the heart of Western Civilization, I decide that the only thing that can satisfy would be a Full English Breakfast in a Full English Pub in England. With some tea. We head down Whitechapel and find The Old Shades just opening for the morning. The proprietor is delighted to have us as his first customers that day.
Breakfast is ordered and tea is served. Black English tea in an English pub in England with a full English breakfast. If I were any more English at that particular moment, a monocle would have spontaneously sprouted from my tear ducts. Breakfast arrives and is incredibly delicious. The sausage is sublime, as is the bacon - even though it is closer to what we Yanks call ham. Finally, the moment I’d been waiting for. A demand I’d been annoying my companions with for hours. Beans On Toast. 
Before heading out I decide to employ the pub’s facilities. Turns out that even the toilets in Westminster could beat up our poor American potties. Every loo I found in that basement water-closet was branded “Armitage Shanks,” which I think we can all agree is an incredibly bad-ass name for a crapper.
Either as a joke or in that darkly dry British humor, the condom machine had a large label affixed to it. “This Is Not a Bomb.” I didn’t stick around to find out if that was true or not, but it struck me as hilarious at the time.
Down towards Parliament, and we start running into bobbies with MP5s. We’re not talking Danny Butterman cops either. These guys look far more akin to Sergeant Nicholas Angel, and they’re clearly not pleased with having to stand around outside while the skies of England piss down. I elect to try taking the Tube back - as this would complete the Essential Englishness of the morning, but I turn back after realizing it’s £4 for a mere two-stop ride per person.
Arriving on foot in the vicinity of Victoria, I discovered that (a) I had about an hour before the train back to Gatwick and (b) there is an open pub directly across the street. I was already eager to try the flavor of UK Guinness, having heard tales of the incredible flavor gulf between Yank-land and Tory-land, fostered by the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. I easily obtained a pint of the stuff and slurped it down; sure, it’s a bit better than US Guinness, but, to me, it’s still relatively flavorless. I’ll have to stop by Dublin at some point for the real experience. I only wish that little UK pub served John Courage.
A short train-ride back to the airport later, I check in and realize I’ve not yet purchased sunglasses to replace the cheap ones I broke on the flight over. Fortunately, there’s a store vending that precise item in the Gatwick Concourse-Lounge. Except, well, they only sell designer sunglasses, starting around £90. Screw that, I’ll squint.
By 15:00, we’re in the air and winging it south over France and the Bay of Biscay, towards Morocco - finally. But that story is for another time. 
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