After an eight hour flight from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to London, England we booked in for the night at the Sheraton Skyline by Heathrow Airport. The cost is reasonable but don't expect the hotel to provide transportation. None of the hotels are allowed to provide this service. There is a low cost bus service, taxi and if you are more adventuresome the local public bus transportation is also available. Here is a link to the Heathrow Airport website.
http://www.heathrowairport.com/transport-and-directions/buses-and-coaches/hotel-buses
We arrived at Terminal 2 and purchased our return bus ticket from the Tourist Information booth. Before leaving the terminal we accessed the free internet on the I pads to make sure that we had our seats booked on the British Airlines flight the next morning. If you check your next flight you can often get the seats that you want. To catch the hotel bus make sure you know the bus number for your hotel and the platform that you will need to wait.
After checking into the hotel get outside and go for a walk in the daylight. This will help you to get your body accustom to the time change. This is also a good time to decide on where you will eat that evening. There is not much around the hotels. There are townhouses and a few local restaurants if you walk a fairly long way from the hotel. Check out the restaurants in the hotels and decide what you want to eat. The Sheraton has an East Indian restaurant that was excellent. The dishes are easily shared and there is enough rice in one serving for two people. The Cobra beer was also a great idea to help cool the heat of the curry.
The Sheraton has free wireless service or you can access the terminals in the lobby. The pool is in the hotels courtyard and covered. This is a lovely area and there is a lounge located around the pool which is open for drinks at 4 pm daily.
The last thing to do before retiring is determine what time to catch the bus to return to the airport. Make sure you know which terminal you need to go to for your next flight. Because we often have a difficult time getting up when we have changed time zones we asked for a wake up call at 5:30 am. To our shock they did not call the room but someone was knocking on our door to wake us up. So we truly got knocked up in the morning. Not sure how long they were knocking on the door before Bill realized that we need to get up.
We were departing from terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. Check in is easy but your baggage tag is printed by an agent after you have check in at the automated terminal. Once through security there are several restaurants on the main floor as well as choices on one level down in the flight hall. Just be aware that you must watch the flight departure board to determine what gate and when you need to be at the gate. Once at the gate we had to take a bus to the plane. Be sure you are at the gate before it closes or you may not catch the bus. For our flight the gate actually closed 30 minutes before the departure time.
The flight to Zagreb, Croatia on British Airlines was great. They had enough time to feed us a light breakfast before landing after two hours. The time change from London is one hour ahead.
The airport at Zagreb is very small. It reminded me of the airports in Canada during the 70's. Not very big and limited services. You can access the airport bus for about 30 Kn to the bus terminal downtown which is about 30 minutes away depending on traffic.. There is no luggage storage at the airport but there is luggage storage at the bus station.
At the time of writing this blog Croatia is officially part of the European Union as of July 1, 2013. They currently use their own currency called the Kuna. As of 2014 they have not decided if they are going to use the Euro.
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