Day 1 London, England

October 15, 2009

Day 1

We have made it to our first destination, London, England. Our flight took us through Chicago, and was fortunately very uneventful. I'm not use to only 8 hr flights, so when they fed us supper and then with less than 2 hours sleep woke me up for breakfast, I wasn't too impressed. Saying good bye to family and friends was definitely difficult and I'm not eager to have homesickness set in (and around Christmas, I can see it being inevitable).

Getting our luggage to the hotel was a pain. I know I probably should have packed less and maybe had better luggage, but this was the only way to fit 40lbs of stuff (instead of 35 lbs with 5 lbs of suitcase). We took a train called Heathrow connect from the airport and then walked a couple of blocks to our hotel when we hit Paddington Station (as in the bear!) I waited in the train station until Trevor found the hotel because the luggage was so heavy (2 trips to get the bags in the hotel!) Our hotel is the Shakespeare Hotel and it's in an old Victorian building. The room is tiny, but at least we have an in suite bathroom. There is no elevator and the stairs are ridiculously steep once you get to the third floor (where of course we ended up) so dragging our bags was interesting.

Today was spent walking around our neighborhood and napping. I only meant to nap for 1 hour, but it turned into 5 hours. The weather was warm and sunny so I wish we had taken advantage, but I guess my body had no intention of functioning with only 2 hours of sleep. In our neighborhood there are a ton of double decker buses as well as fun red phone booths. We walked through Hyde park a bit (it's massive) and we'll try and see the Peter Pan Statue (the one from the movie Hook) tomorrow. We also walked around after supper and ended up in a very Egyptian part of town with tons of Shisha bars.

So far everything is great. We are 7 hours ahead of Edmonton so right now it's 10p as I write (3p Edmonton). That's all I have for now.

I'll talk to you all soon!

The Travelling Prentices