It was the final day of our stay in The City, and we were back at the breakfast table eating cakes, corn-flakes, and fresh orange juice. We had eight hours to kill after checkout. I was happy, tired, and now ready to go back home, and so were my intelligent, curious sisters. There was my twin sister who was annoying, supported by, Susie, my little sister who was more annoying. I had won the lottery as far as annoying sisters went.
     “We have time to go to the British Museum!” Dad said, with a gleam in his eyes.
     I groaned inwardly, and soon we were hurtling towards the Museum in the famous city’s Taxi. As we passed the Big Ben, my mom clapped her hands on her head and exclaimed,” We left our passports at the hotel!” My twin sister rolled her eyes and kept muttering to herself. Conversing with herself was my twin sister’s hobby.
     “We will collect them when we go get our luggage, no worries!” Dad said, showing a positive attitude in face of a situation that was bound to get worse in the next few hours.
     The short- tempered cab driver of the musty cab deposited us outside the British Museum and hurled a curse when my dad tipped him one shilling and said, ”There you go dear chap! This generous tip will surely make your day!”
     The museum was huge and as we marveled its beauty, my mom again clapped her hands on her head and exclaimed, ”Where is Susie? She’s gone!”
     Susie was an inquisitive girl who poked her nose into everything and as usual, she had wandered off. We started a frantic search and my dad ran through the corridors trying to locate her in the Egyptian Rooms and I wondered aloud if she was in one of the sarcophaguses when my twin sister came running by.
     “We found her. She was in the cafe,” she huffed and puffed.
     We ran to the cafe where Susie was standing in front of a large cooler.
     “Ice cream!” she had pointed to a big cone, and gave a toothless smile.
     Ice creams and chocolates had finished off her milk teeth at an early age. Dad gave her a chocolate ice cream and she was slurping away.
     I noticed that Susie was slurping an empty cone. I wondered where the ice cream had disappeared and the next moment we heard a loud crash followed by a boom. A posh looking man had slipped on Susie’s ice cream, now melting on the floor, and his lunch had fallen on top of an old, grumpy woman who was immediately drenched with ketchup. The boom was the sound of an entire cupboard full of crockery falling down as the old woman ran amok in her wheelchair and crashed.
     “Run!” cried my mom, and we blasted out of the museum like fugitives from a lunatic asylum.
     We flagged down one of the city’s famed double decker and my dad stayed on the lower deck to pay. As he started to pay, his wallet fell on the pavement and he got down to fetch it. The bus driver left without him. I was on the top deck, leaning out of the window as I spied a familiar portly figure running like Usain Bolt. It was my dad! He was chasing our bus and there was a small dog snapping at his heels. We yelled, went down, pleaded with the bus driver to stop and soon, my dad was on board, sans a shoe and his pants in tatters. The driver admonished us to get down and take another bus. We walked the entire way back and reached the hotel with three hours to go before our flight time.
     A big ambulance was outside and the hotel staff informed us that the Hotel Manager had been taken ill.
     ”The Big Manager ran after you in the morning, shouting something about your passports. He fell ill immediately after because he had never run so fast!” a petite maid said excitedly.
     “Holy cow!” shouted my dad. “Our passports are with him!”
     Dad went after the ambulance, jumped inside, and tried to revive the Hotel Manager who was hooked up to all kinds of equipment. Dad had recently taken a course in CPR and as he tried his skills on the Hotel Manager, thumping his fists on his chest, the paramedics let out a yell and threw him out of the ambulance unceremoniously. The Hotel Manager survived, but that is a tale for another day. We pretended that we did not know our dad, who was nursing his injured ego, sitting on the pavement. My mom went inside to enquire about our passports.
The Petite Maid knew of a Tall Doorman, who had our passports. An hour later, we were reunited with our bags and passports after a lot of explanations and phone calls.
     It was now nearly too late to catch our flight, but die-hard dad hailed a cab and said dramatically, ”Make way to Heathrow my man and step on it!” The ensuing journey was harrowing, thrilling, and will stay with me in my nightmares. We weaved through Baker Street, made a squealing U-Turn on Oxford Street, narrowly missed an oncoming lorry, all in the space of the next five minutes. The cab door was loose and Susie fell out on one slow turn and I had to run back and pick her up somewhere near Charing Cross Street.
     We twisted, turned, moved through traffic at impossible angles, left a cacophony of honks behind us, and were mixed with our luggage by the time the taxi stopped at Heathrow. My arm was entwined in a suitcase, Susie had a purse on her head, and Dad was somewhere on the floor below our large cases. The line at Heathrow was extra long, and my mom had a brainwave.       
     “This man cannot walk and needs a wheelchair please!” she shouted.
     The airline staff took one look at my Dad’s ashen face, shoeless legs in tatters and someone shouted, ”A wheelchair for this gentleman please!” Dad was scooped up and deposited on a reedy looking wheelchair which looked ready to break down anytime. As they started to push him, the wheelchair got caught in Susie’s blanket and my dad landed face down on the floor. Luckily, the carpeting saved him and he was back in his wheelchair mumbling under his breath. His gaze was cross eyed and I was beginning to get worried about him.
     We breezed through all the lines and later, my dad nearly got into a fight with a friendly gate agent who said, “Grandpa, we hope you enjoyed your stay in The City.”
     As the plane took off, the family settled in. Susie was snoring, her breath working in tandem with the plane’s engines. Mom was fast asleep, a blanket over her head. Dad was alert and back to his old self.
     “That was one magnificent and crazy trip wasn’t it?” he asked, his eyes twinkling like the stars outside the plane window.
     I nodded in agreement, grinned back at him, closed my eyes and fell asleep instantaneously.