Day 1

Well, we arrived at about 7:45 AM England time, which was about 12:45 AM Gilbert time, after a long flight of not too much sleep because of excitement. I watched the sun rise over the Atlantic with the moon just over the wing. It was really beautiful. Cameron watched movies on the little tv and was able to sleep just a little, but not too much. He was really excited to get here.

We got in, got through customs pretty quickly and then found the train that would take us into London proper. It was a gorgeous ride, all of the green countryside and the gardens everywhere. We got into Paddington Station and then spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out where exactly our hotel was. Luckily, when you ask people for help here they are more than happy to give you directions and a nice old lady pointed us in the right direction. We found our hotel and checked our luggage so we could go out and start to enjoy London.

Our hotel is near Hyde Park, so we figured that was as good of place as any to start out. Beautiful!! It's a huge park and we wandered through it in search of caffeine to keep our eyes open and ended up at a McDonald's near the Marble Arch. We also happened to find a double-decker tour like Cameron and I have taken in New York and San Francisco, so we bought tickets and hopped on. We found out that the Marble Arch was placed near the site of most of the hangings that happened in London, and that at an average public hanging there would be over 200,000 people in attendance! WOW! It was actually built for Buckingham Palace but Queen Victoria didn't like it so she had a coach built that was too big to fit through it so it had to be moved to Hyde Park (site of Kensington Palace).

We rode through various sections of town, learned some trivia (the first Indian restaurant was opened in 1809, but closed soon there after and now Indian food is more popular than fish and chips in London), found some good places to shop later this week and hopped off at the The National Gallery to see a Picasso exhibit.

The National Gallery is this huge museum that is free to the public and full of wonderful treasures of art. We saw pictures by Picasso, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo and so many others. There were pictures that were painted in the 1200's and still as colorful as the day they were painted. Cameron explained many a picture to me that had some sort of mythological basis or ones that he's learned about because of Art Masterpiece. He was loving all the art. By this point, we were EXHAUSTED and cranky, so we headed back to the hotel for a quick nap.

After our nap, we took a while to figure out how to get around on the Underground and headed for the Tower of London. It's a fairly impressive building, to say the least. We arrived too late in the day for a proper tour, so just walked the River Thames, saw the NEW London Bridge, walked across it and then walked and walked and walked. We saw remnants of the Roman Wall, old ships, monuments, St. Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben... so many things just walking this wonderful old city. We walked from The Tower to Trafalger Square to Picadilly Circus to the Soho area. We were hungry by this time so found Chinatown and ate at a place that had a decent Sweet and Sour Chicken, according to Cameron (he claims it was the best he's ever eaten). Then we took the Underground back home for a well deserved night of sleep.

I am writing this at 4:30ish AM London time because I woke up and couldn't sleep. Sorry for any errors or ramblings - I'm tired (but a great kind of tired!) We'll add more tomorrow. We'll add the pictuers tomorrow, it's taking too long right now.