London Calling! Part One

The first stop on our trip was London. A little backstory--we bought all of our tickets together, save the one from Paris to London. Well, tickets all bought, we thought we were doing well. I started to put together an itinerary to give to our families (back home and host) and almost had a heart attack. When looking at flights to London, we decided to leave later in the evening (rather than taking a 9am flight) because we weren't sure just how long it would take us to get to Paris and how early trains ran. So we all bought tickets for a flight closer to 6pm... Or so we thought. In putting together the itinerary, I realized that I had booked the 9am flight.

Cue the freak out.

I immediately emailed Maddie asking her to confirm what time her flight was at. Of course it was at 6pm. Same with Angela.

Cue an even bigger freak out.

I immediately get on the phone with the travel company that I had booked the ticket through. They said they would check into changing the flight and call me back when they knew how much it would cost. Slightly calmer, I descended for dinner with my host family. I told my host mom of my plight and she was actually really awesome. She immediately got on the computer with me to look at the fine print and company policies. We determined that even if I wasn't charged any penalty fees for changing the flight (under French law, you have the right to cancel your flight within 7 days with no charge), the flight itself had more than doubled in price, and there was no way to avoid paying the difference. So my host mom told me that I should just go by myself--I was already slightly familiar with London, and Maddie & Angela would be joining me no more than 8 hours later.

So, that's just what I did. I phoned the company back and told them I wouldn't be needing to change my ticket and I got a train out of Orléans at 4:58 am Saturday morning (the 25th of February). I'll spare you all the travel details as everything went smoothly.

In the London airport I get stuck waiting almost 2 hours for a bus into the city. This was less than ideal, but it did allow me to meet a couple kids doing something called a Jail Break. Essentially--they were college students raising money for some cause or another. I think they said that they had already raised 12,000 pounds and now had 36 hours to get as far away from London as possible without using ANY money. Similar to a road rally, they also had a list of challenges to complete. While I was buying myself a sandwich for lunch, they approached me and asked if I'd be willing to buy them something to drink (soda, water, juice, etc) to complete one of the challenges. I did, they took a picture with me. I should've had them take a picture with my camera as well, but I gave them my email address to email me the picture and haven't gotten anything yet. Oh well, I do hope that they got far away from London (they were trying to get one of the airlines to give them a free flight out of the city).

When I made it into the city I just kind of wandered around for a while. I found a couple of poets performing on a street corner and stopped to watch and talk to them for about a half an hour. Then I wanted to find my way to the Thames riverbank (to find some street artists), but ended up turned around and at Hyde Park. I grabbed a hot dog at the entrance--watched a minor fender bender unravel. One man, rear ended by another, got out of his car and was positively SCREAMING at the guy behind him. The guy who hit him was actually trying to just leave the scene, but there were too many people watching at this point, so the angry man finally succeeded at getting a pen and getting his information.


Once in Hyde Park, I sat down and rearranged my luggage a bit while I ate. Then I just wandered. I found a group of guys roller-dancing which was actually quite amusing. I sat and watched them for quite some time just enjoying the sunshine and warm weather (that's right--sunshine in London!). There's some video I took of the roller-dancing here.

After Hyde Park, I decided to brave the metro to head up to Camden Market. I wandered around there for about an hour before deciding to head back toward Victoria Station (where I'd be meeting the girls) to grab some food. Well, the Camden metro stop was an absolute MESS. There were so many people that I decided to hoof it to another metro stop. The only problem was that the map I had purchased did not actually have Camden area on it. So I wandered around aimlessly, getting pretty lost, until I got directions from some nice woman and ended up back where I started.

While waiting for Maddie and Angela, some Russian guy came over and started talking to me. He was very strange. He said he tutored kids for free, so to earn money he would resell Underground tickets. Highly illegal, and I'm just glad he eventually left. Maddie and Angela finally showed up, we got lost on the way to the hostel, but finally made it (exhausted and hungry). Luckily the hostel was also a bar that served cheap pizza.

Our hostel -- The White Ferry Inn near Victoria Station. Definitely recommend

Sunday morning we were up bright and early to head out to our tour of Windsor, Stonehenge and Bath. The queen was actually in residence at Windsor, so I suppose I can say that I was once in the same building as the Queen of England. The castle was absolutely beautiful, but the most impressive thing was Queen Mary's dollhouse. It is absolutely HUGE and exquisite.

We weren't allowed to take pictures, but here's one from Google to give you an idea of the size of the doll house.

 

Windsor Castle

This is where guests come to visit the queen--like at Will & Kate's wedding reception.

They had this gorgeous garden moat thing.

Quick picture with the guard before heading back to the bus!

After Windsor Castle we went to Stonehenge. It's pretty incredible. We had absolutely beautiful weather, so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

The heel stone--it looks like it's got a sock puppet face.

After Stonehenge, we headed out to the little village of Lacock (pronounced "lay-cock"). First, lunch was AMAZING. We had beef wellington (for free--I don't think it was supposed to be included with our tour, but it was). Then we explored this cute little medieval town for a bit and saw where they filmed parts of Harry Potter.

Various pictures of the Harry Potter filming activity in Lacock.

The restaurant where I had the most amazing beef wellington ever.

Professor Slughorn's house from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Professor Slughorn's house again.

After Lacock we headed off to the city of Bath, where we got to go into the Roman Baths. The Roman Baths were built around a hot spring, and it's said that the water has the power to cure any ailment (a result of it containing no less than 23 different minerals).

Looking down on the Roman Bath.

Pretty colors! :)

Sitting next to the Roman Bath.

Drinking water from the hot spring. It had a bit of a funky aftertaste, but was otherwise pretty good.

After Bath we headed home to London where we had fish and chips for dinner (in true English style). And so concluded our first day together in London. More to come. :)