London Trip June 2018 Day One

Our flight on British Airways left Sunday evening. Yeah, no problems with the passports!  As we were standing in line to board, someone said Hello to Scott. Turns out, most of his engineering class was on the same flight to London with their families! Looks like everyone had the same idea on how to celebrate their kids graduation!

We had a wonderful flight over-slept and watched movies, listened to music, played video games and ate! British Airways loves to feed their passengers.  We arrived in London as the sun was rising on Monday morning. Tom had traded in all his travel points for a Double Tree hotel in Kingston on the Thames, a small town south of downtown London. In order to be more frugal on our spending, Tom decided we could take public transportation to get to our hotel from the airport. Lots of people in Europe do it-you see people riding the trains and subways pulling their luggage everywhere. Allison and I had to do it when we traveled with Girl Scouts to Europe. So we were all on board to travel around town via subway and train. And if necessary, take an Uber ride (or two). Unfortunately, I am always the big packer and I was hauling the most stuff. But it was the same suitcase I took to Europe when Allison and I traveled and I had to haul it by myself back then, so I figured, no problem.

Since we have never traveled around London by ourselves before, we really had no idea on distance(or difficulty). Just saying. We did do some planning ahead and purchased a touring card from Costco before we left. It was actually an app on Tom's cell phone. The London Pass allowed us access to over 60 different tourist sights, however, you had to use it within 4 days in a row. We also knew we wanted to use an Oyster card for the public transportation. We purchased that card when we got to the train station at Heathrow airport and then started our adventure! I can only tell you that taking public transportation with all your luggage sounded like a good idea on paper. There were no direct lines to Kingston from the airport, so we had to take a train into downtown London and then switch to the subway to another train line to Kingston. And the train and subway stations have a whole lot of stairs! Elevators are not easily located, and not every station has an escalator, so dragging suitcases up and down steps and through turnstiles turned out to be a whole lot of fun!(Not!).

But we made it to the train station in Kingston and then had to find our hotel. Tom had an address on his phone and a walking App. However, the apps don't actually work in real time and we found ourselves dragging our luggage around town, narrowly avoiding getting run over by cars, taxis, buses and bicycles as we detoured around construction and closed sidewalks. We finally arrived to our hotel and discovered that it was just a block or so away from the train station-we took the scenic route. We dropped off our luggage and headed into downtown Kingston after I picked up a paper map. We headed to the river and walked along the bank through a park into downtown. Tom chose Kingston as he has traveled to the area previously on work and was familiar with the hotel and restaurants in the area. We had a great time walking along the river, watching all the swans and boats floating by as well as stopping in to a local pub for a late lunch. Tom had an agenda to keep-to visit the oldest pubs in London and try all the different beer. And because the drinking age is 18, he wanted to introduce Scott to the different beer flavors. Allison and I also enjoyed peaking into a few shops and relaxing outside in the city center which was an old church turned into an antique store with a statue of Queen Anne.

We were all pretty tired, and Tom was worried if we went to bed too early we would be off schedule for the rest of our busy trip, so he tried to keep us awake back at the hotel. Allison and I decided to walk over to a local pizza shop, Pizza Express and pick up some dinner for carryout. Yum. Turns out, Tom and Scott fell asleep before we got back with our dinner. We also managed to break out hotel room as we attempted to plug in all our electronics. Scott had brought a power strip so we would have plenty of plugs. We know we have to use adapters on the electronics, which Tom added to the power strip, but it did not seem to be enough and we blew the power in the room after Tom got a big shock! So we had to request maintenance to come flip the switch! And the bathroom light never worked right for the whole visit after that. It's amazing that we survived day one of

the trip!