We dropped Rajah off at the kennel on Thursday night so we could be up and ready to go the next day without having to worry about running late for the plane. The flight there was uneventful which is always good when flying right?
We landed and then I realize my first mistake. Don't look at a map as Lloyd and Harry do on Dumb and Dumber.....you will have to take a train from the Stansted airport all the way to Liverpool Street Station and then catch the Tube (the London Metro) to Brixton Station and from there you will need to catch the 159 bus to the Streatham stop and walk a few blocks to get to the house that you thought was located in an area within a pretty decent distance from all things that are London....and you will be sorely mistaken. Yes, the house came at a good price, but no, I did not know that there would be 3 stories of stairs you needed to climb with your bags in order to get to the little room that we rented and that there was a family living downstairs and 3-4 other "room renters" there. No, I didn't know. That was lesson number two. Both of these lessons ended up costing more than the savings were during the time of planning and booking. Next time, stay in the more pricey hotel or house and save money on getting to the city center and buying Oyster cards for the bus and tube, and I mean like £100 worth or more. Also, when booking said cheap tickets, try not to book the return flight for 6:30 am when it takes you about 1.5 hours to get to the airport and you have to make sure there is a bus that runs at 2:30 in the morning from the aforementioned neighborhood. Phew. Are you exhausted yet? We were. I'll tell you about the return adventure at the end of this post.
We didn't do a ton on Friday after we got there, we were hungry and tired. We ate at the Patty & Bun restaurant that people had told Glenn about after getting off of the train. It was pretty good. Two of the kids chose to have McDonald's from across the street. I'll bet you can't guess which ones. :) After eating our lunch/dinner while worrying about being shat on by the pigeons we moved on to figure out our get to the room route.
Almost forgot about this doozie of a plug. We got on the train thinking we could use our European adaptors to charge up our goods that had been partially drained on the plane....we were wrong. One look at this had us saying, "What the wha?" We ended up napping instead.
Nothing says welcome to London better than, well, an actual sign that says "Welcome to London" right when you get off the train, am I right?
My panorama pictures aren't half as good as the ones Glenn took but he's not here to let me at 'em so you're going to get my shots. It was kind of crazy actually seeing Big Ben in person. It was like we were thrown into the 101 Dalmatians cartoon from your childhood. We took a stroll across the bridge and looked at it from up close too.
Like I said, my panoramas....not as good as Glenn's but still. I wouldn't mind a little bit of the weight loss it looks like Christopher has gotten. He looks like Flat Stanley, but obviously he's flat Christopher in this one. Alexander looks like he's either lost an arm or is turned at a really crazy angle. The tower bridge was impressive. It's about as tall as the house we were staying in and had to climb all the stairs.
Oh lookie here, it's a London cab, with the driver on the wrong side of the car. Madison made a good point about the cars with front seat passengers. It looked as though the driver wasn't paying any attention to the road to us since they weren't actually the driver. Some were texting, looking at their phones, looking out the side window and mainly being irresponsible drivers had they been the driver.
Our first trip on the Tube, good thing Glenn knew how to figure this thing out. It took me until about Sunday night when we were heading back for the day.
Christopher was trying to conserve seat space while Alexander was thinking how cool it was that you could see yourself on the surveillance camera television screen towards the front of the bus. He was waving at it and dancing trying to catch himself on the tv.
I thought it was funny that there was a store called brass tacks...was it a general store? A plain old brass tack store or something in particular that you needed to get down to? Maybe it was just a meeting place that is the underlying cause to us saying, "Now let's get down to brass tacks." Who knows?
Looking for house number 79.....only a few blocks up the road. Thank God it wasn't raining, this time. At least the rain we had to walk through once was a light sprinkling mist.
I can't even remember the name of this place. They had some good meat though.
I'm not sure I would try this, even if it DOES have the word pie written on it.
We found the London Eye. We wandered around for a bit trying to figure out which direction to go in.
Even Bigger Ben up close.
There's Glenn, admiring what an amazing panorama he took with his phone.
We should have some of these phone booths in the states. They're so cute, people might actually use them.
Daddy took us down a scary looking sidewalk.
See, you can tell we were nervous right?
The tower bridge up close and personal. These buildings are beautifully made.
Admiring Madison's polaroid shots while drinking a café mocha at Costa.
She likes to photobomb shard pics. The Shard is the tallest building in London. It kind of makes Madison look like a unicorn.
This is their "let's see who can stand up on the tube the longest without holding on" game. It wasn't an overly smooth ride but it wasn't horrible. I wouldn't have been able to stand up very long though. This thing has some great brakes.
We made it to Trafalgar square and the kids didn't want to get their picture taken with the giant lion statue.
Ripley's believe it or not museum.
This poor guy got bitten by a shark. I'm not 100% sure why there's an alligator beside him. It is very misleading. Oh well, he shouldn't have touched the shark's private parts.
Photo-op! They all played along for my sake.
Until things got real and the boys thought it was funny to trap Madison for real.
No children were harmed in the taking of these photos.
We went to a steakhouse and Alexander got a balloon. The balloon might have tasted a little better than the steak.
It was a long day of walking. According to Glenn's phone, we walked 10 miles that day.
After that, we missed the first bus that didn't even come up to the stop it was assigned. The second one parked way up the street past the assigned stop and we ran for the third one because we weren't going to wait anymore.
Getting ready to start our Sunday, heading to the bus.
FYI, if you'd like to do some doddling, follow the white line.
Madison got this picture for me because in order to see this changing of the guard, you needed to be 6'2" or be on the shoulders of someone else.
Alexander listening in on the tour bus information with the provided headphones.
This wasn't in the itinerary. I wondered if this was on Madison's bucket list too like running to catch a plane was. I asked and she said no, it wasn't. At least we all made it.
It's the walkie talkie building. The reason it's called that is because it's shaped like one.
This place was pretty cool, for the kids and I. Glenn wasn't too fond of it because it was sort of discombobulated and confusing. I'm used to chaos in my head so I didn't seem to mind.
Leaden hall market. Little did I know that this place would be closed on a Sunday.....another lesson learned. This is where parts of Harry Potter were filmed.
The struggle is real. The British get that it's best not to piss anyone off.
We tried some Gozleme with beef. It was pretty tasty say 2 out of 3 kids, until you buy it for them, then it's not as good as the free sample........
Nina makes some yummy treats.
Alexander picked the red velvet cupcake. At least he got the majority of it in his mouth.
Glenn chose the raspberry cheesecake and it was DEE-LISH-US! I should have had that one.
Instead, I chose the rocky road treat thing that caught my eye. It was still pretty good, but not raspberry cheesecake good. Another lesson learned.
Finding our way back after searching for the Rib Man on Brick Street. We were never able to find him, which led to us eating chinese food and gozlemes.
We quickly looked through the Old Spitalfields Market since they were all closing up shop by the time we finished our unsuccessful search.
So yeah, this place.......Alexander said he thinks they serve hot dogs maybe......okay.
Well this guy's not having a good time digging, someone made sure of that.
Just in case you didn't know, running in stations causes problems, like, lined in chalk with your briefcase next to you problems.
Monday morning, oh how we despised you. We got to the airport ready to get on the plane and get home in a few hours to rest after getting up at 1:15 a.m. to get ready to catch the bus to catch the tube to catch the train to catch the plane. I just channeled my inner Dr. Suess there. :) Anyway, there would be no plane catching this morning because the French air traffic controllers decided not to work that day which equals no flights going over France....
Which leads to this letter and Glenn bringing me a coffee after me waiting in line for 2+ hours and moving slightly faster than a snail.
We were rerouted through Porto, Portugal which has one of the rudest ladies working for National car rental ever. They wanted 1,000 Euros to rent a car in Portugal and drop it off in Spain and that's not including the price of the car! We went with Avis who had a fee of just 600 Euros to drop it off in another country. So, here are your Portugal pictures that I took out of the window of the sweetest piece of crap car that 650+ Euros will get you.
Someone was excited to be home! We sure missed our baby girl. Yolanda at the kennel said she made friends there though. :)
So that's it for now folks. My fingers are cold because this house is made of concrete and cinder blocks so I'm going to get moving. I'll try to get the pictures in the next post in the correct order.
Have a great day everyone and may your next trip be less stressful because of the lessons we learned.
No comments:
Post a Comment