Attention travelers bound for London, England: I have news you can use.
Let’s start with the good news. Thanks to a new line of budget hotels, you will have a much easier time taking a nap at London’s Gatwick Airport. (The airport is notorious for delays, which means at some point you will inevitably be scrounging the terminals for a place to crash.) Yotels, located within the airport’s terminal, features budget-priced pint-sized cabins with beds, showers, flat-screen TVs and free Internet. Cabins range in size from about 22 to 32 square feet and cost $50-$80 per four-hour minimum. Additional hours start at $10 an hour.
And more good news: Thirty-two Yotel cabins are scheduled to open at London’s Heathrow Airport this fall and 55 will be available at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in early 2008.
And now for the bad news…
If you have plans to travel to London this fall you may be disappointed to learn that you will not get the chance to take in one of the city’s most memorable experiences—-listening to Big Ben’s bongs. The famous clock fell silent yesterday as workers began a month of maintenance work on the clock and its world-famous bell.
That means you will not be able to hear Big Ben’s hourly bongs or the chimes that mark each quarter-hour. However, you will be given the rare opportunity to see workers rappel down the iconic clock tower. Yesterday the clock’s hands were frozen at 12 o’clock while a team of “industrial rope-access technicians” cleaned the world-famous attraction’s four latticework faces. The work is being done in preparation for Big Ben’s 150th anniversary in 2009.
According to city officials, this is the first time since 1956 that both Big Ben’s bongs and chimes have been silenced. And while the clock will soon be ticking again, it will take workers another six weeks to replace bearings in the clock mechanism. So the city will be without one of its most distinctive sounds until late September.
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