LONDON -- Traveling alone and almost unrecognized in the bustling airport, Barry Sanders walked away from the NFL with a briefcase over his shoulder and two carry-on bags in tow.

He seemed more than a little lost.

	Barry Sanders spent his first day in retirement strolling through London's Gatwick Airport.

Sanders looked like any other tourist who'd decided on a whim to take a few weeks off and kiss the job goodbye.

He slumped for 40 minutes at a rental-car counter at London's Gatwick Airport on Wednesday and searched for a hotel reservation at the height of the jammed summer season.

He said he hadn't slept, although a wrinkled, beige polo shirt suggested he'd tried. The Detroit Lions running back was clear why he was leaving the NFL, but was vague about why he'd come to London.

"Do you have to have a reason to come here?" he quipped after arriving on a three-hour delayed, overnight flight from Detroit. "I don't say goodbye too well, I guess. I'm not a TV-camera-type of person."

Sanders initially was angered when a photographer and reporter approached.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd leave and stop taking pictures," he said.

He changed money, complained briefly to airport security about the photographs, and seemed briefly disoriented. But he mellowed when 12-year-old David Groves approached and asked him to autograph his brown baseball cap.

"I don't think he wanted to be noticed," said the 12-year-old from Portage, Mich., who arrived in London with his family on the same flight from Detroit.

Sanders eventually became talkative as he trudged around the airport for 2½ hours. But he added little more than he had in a prepared statement released by his agent.

He didn't plan to change his mind about retirement and said he would stay several days in London and then visit Paris or Amsterdam "with possibly some stops in between" before returning home in "about two weeks."

"Ten years is a lot of football," he said. "I'm just really not feeling like playing. It's just getting to that point. It's not the same game. Really, I've been battling for the last few years. As I've gotten older, the game has changed in my mind.

"I'm thinking about doing other things," he added. "It's still fun, but not as fun. It just felt like it was time."

Asked if he might change his mind, he shook his head.

"I don't think that's going to happen. I'm not really thinking about that."

Sanders said he was retiring before he became "old and gray and can't run" and got "kicked out."

He said he didn't feel "unfulfilled" about not playing in the Super Bowl. "It didn't happen ... I didn't play in the Super Bowl, but I can still sleep at night."

"I'm just going to enjoy life. I have enough things to keep me busy. I'll do something productive, but I don't know exactly what it will be."

His main job Wednesday was to get to central London. He rented a manual-shift car, walked to the parking lot to test it, then returned it for an automatic. Driving on the left side of the road was challenge enough.

"I didn't want to have to learn how to shift with my left hand today. I'll have enough problems driving without learning how to do that."

He joked he'd come to London to "elope, and then said he'd "stay here for life and be buried in England."

"Maybe when I'm 45 and too old to play, maybe I can come over here and play in Europe," he said as he got into the blue sedan for the congested 30-mile drive to downtown London.

"All I want now is a good night's sleep and something to eat."