london, part two

Read London, Part One here.

I firmly believe that when you go on a trip you should have an itinerary. Not a minute-by-minute, steadfast, love-and-die-by-it schedule, just a list of things that you would like to see and places you want to go, that you've researched out BEFORE you get there. And if it is organized by most-least desired it's even better.


Basically the point of this entire trip was to see as much as we could possibly see, without killing ourselves over it. My mom was REALLY organized with her planning and had gathered a lot of good advice before she came on her very first overseas trip. She had a notebook of paperwork, maps, and travel information with her so that made it a lot easier to plan each day.


When we were finally reunited the first night in London, (And after a short detour in the Hyde Park area of the city--no, we weren't lost, just confused--when we started running into streets of Foreign Embassies we knew we were in a posh, albeit wrong, place.) we gathered in my parent's hotel room and went through our lists together. Anything that we had BOTH marked as something we wanted to see went to the top of the list. Straightaway we cleared a few items on the list. They were worthy sites, and we would have gotten to them had we been only visiting one of the cities, but because we were going to lose some time traveling between cities, we were fairly brutal when it came to the final list.


Each subsequent night we would gather in one of our hotel rooms and plan what we wanted to do the next day. During the day if we missed something or realized that one of the sites we had planned was closer to the ones planned for the next day, we'd shuffle things around. Often we would spend more time than we had thought at places that surprised and pleased our attentions. Really, it was a glorious way to travel.


Our second day started with a walk along the River Thames towards the Parliament Building and Westminster Abby. (See pictures above, and immediately below)


We then went to the incredible Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum. No pictures, but we for sure went there. I highly recommend it if you're every going to London. It was fascinating.


We then walked to Trafalgar Square and went to the excellent (get the audio-guide, it's amazing) National Gallery and the less interesting, but still cool, National Portrait Gallery.

Even though this picture is not great, I wanted to show you that Darren was actually on the trip. It's a crop and resize of a much larger photo of the entire building, so forgive me.

We ended the night walking through Piccadilly Circus and eating yummy food at Wagamama.

Then crashed in bed that night!

Next post: full-English breakfasts and more pictures.

And because I can't post without a funny/embarrassing Darren story...

While standing on Westminster Bridge, Darren commented to my Dad, "Look at those ladies!" when he saw this:


Only my Dad thought that he was talking about these ladies:



So funny!