We slept fitfully on the plane for several hours, until the cabin crew declared it to be morning and started serving the coffee. As we flew over England it was a clear sunny day and the countryside was very pretty. 

 
We arrived at Gatwick at what would have been 9:00 am our time, but was 3:00 pm in England. Gatwick airport is surprisingly big. We took a shuttle train from the north terminal to the south terminal and went down into the train station to find a train to London. Turns out its easy to get on and off the trains, as you only need to tap your credit card as you enter and exit the train platforms. The down side is that we had no idea what we were paying for the train! (Turns out we were on the Gatwick Express, for which the charge on our credit card statement was $36 per person.)

After a 30 minute train ride we arrived at Victoria Station in London. It was really busy. People were racing in all directions while we waddled through with our big backpacks bumping into the commuters.
 
At Victoria we found a phone kiosk and bought a SIM card and phone plan for Heather's iPhone.

From Victoria Station we needed to take a subway to get to David's place. When we tried to go down into the subway, a man turned us back saying we had to use a different entrance because there were too many people and they were changing the entrances to be 'one way' to ease the congestion.

Took the Vic line to Oxford Circus and then the 'red' line to Holborn. From there it was only 3 or 4 minutes walk to David's flat. It seemed like a pretty posh area as the street outside the building was lined with pricy cars (Mercedes, Jaguar, Porsche, Lexus, repeat...).

After dropping off our luggage and resting for a bit we went back out. It was Halloween night, and we occasionally saw people dressed in costumes. But generally speaking there was very little halloween related decoration and what not. We did see one house with jack-o-lanterns in front, and a couple of kids out trick-or-treating, but that was about it.

We walked to the nearest Barclays bank ATM and took out some British pounds. Then found a pub called The Perseverance. We tried to order some chocolate beer which David had recommended, but they said they'd stopped carrying it months ago. Fortunately they had many other choices and we ordered fish and chips to go along with our pints.
 
Then walked back home and crawled into bed exhausted.