London: Day One

Hello everyone. This is the first post of the week — a week in which you will see a daily post about our time in London. Although we’d already been to London (last year), we were interested in a return in order to see a lot of what you miss as a ‘long weekend tourist’. That is, we’ve seen Big Ben and all that, but haven’t actually gone into Buckingham Palace, gone to the British Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Aquarium … you get the the picture. So, here we are from Sunday 25 July to Sunday 1 August, 2010.

Today was less than exciting, but still nice. We’d booked a train out of Harrogate for 09:53am to catch a 10:40am train from Leeds to London. Little did we know that the train conductor for the 09:53am would decide not to show up. The train was canceled. This sucked. Let me explain. We booked early enough so that we could have a table on the train — two chairs facing two chairs, with a table in the middle. We’d bought the kids some activity magazines (crappy plastic toys, magazines, and stickers — it’s a big hit) to use on said table. But, because we couldn’t take our original train, we had to take the 10:53am and catch the 11:40am from Leeds to London. And why does this suck? Because we no longer had reserved seats and had to sit on the floor between train cars for 2hrs 15 mins. Yes, that’s right. Luckily, Sabine slept the whole time in her stroller and Elliott and I played on the iPod.  He was quite well behaved.

So, we arrived at Kings Cross Station a little past 2pm, and hopped on the Piccadilly tube to Covent Garden — our home for the next week. We decided to skip the hotel thing and rent a flat through VRBO. It costs about the same as a hotel in a good location, but we’re able to cook for ourselves for a lot of meals, which saves a lot of money in London. But the location is excellent — we’re just outside the Covent Garden Piazza, which is where all the street vendors and performers are.

I’d hoped to post some pictures of the flat, but realized that we forgot the proprietary camera cord to transfer pictures. Sooooo, this week’s blog will need to be supplemented by photos from our iPhone. Unfortunately, we haven’t taken these yet. Stay tuned on that one.

Not sure what we’re going to do tomorrow. We have a huge lists of museums and attractions to see, and we haven’t really discussed tomorrow. The weather looks to be pretty good this week (between 71 and 77 F) down here. To those of you who’ve visited, you’ll notice that this is warmer than we’re used to up north, but it’s still not too hot.

So, that’s all I’ve got for now. We just got the kids off to bed (after a day-long grab bag of good and bad behavior), and we’re enjoying some wine. Time to go figure out what we’re doing. Oh, and I just reminder myself that I can steal the photos of the place from VRBO. So here they are. Goodnight. — Mike

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