London Day 1.

Oh man, we are HOME. It was an absolutely amazing trip and it is SO weird to adjust back to normal life after 16 days of vacation!! I have been dreading doing the blog post(s) about our trip, because I took almost 1,000 pictures and of course have a million stories I want to share/record... so that's pretty overwhelming. I have no idea how many "parts" this blog series will have and I will try to not post all 1,000 pictures but we'll see :)

I guess I'll start at the very beginning (a very good place to start!) We left Portland bright and early on Saturday morning October 11. It was a surreal feeling knowing I was leaving to fly to England. I have dreamed of going there for as long as I can remember. It just didn't feel like it could really be happening. We had a long layover in Dallas, which worked out perfectly to pick up Suzette and Jason (Landon's mom and husband) who came on the trip with us! We went back to their house for a bit and ate chick-fil-a (Oregon needs to get one ASAP) and hung out with Landon's family. Then it was time to go! Holy moly. We got to the airport just in time to board. It was one of the nicest planes I've been on... which was great considering we had a 9 hour flight ahead of us! Suzette and Jason sat behind us and we tried to sleep... but without much luck. We did have tv's on the back of the chair with FREE movies, so the flight really wasn't too bad other than knowing we should be sleeping...

We had an AMAZING view of London from the plane and I was just in shock! My stomach was full of butterflies as we flew right over the River Thames and right past Big Ben and The London Eye!! I couldn't believe we were really there. Once we landed, we literally hit the ground running. We hopped right on the tube and headed to our cute flat. It was kind of intimidating getting on the tube (subway) because we had no idea what we were doing and how to use our tickets. A cute worker gave me the advice to just push my way up to the gate with my ticket ready to go and hurry because once I got to the center of London, people would just push me right out of the way. I'm glad I had a practice round to be timid at the airport because you definitely had to be more aggressive in London! ;)

This is the very first picture I took in London and I think its pretty darn cute :)

I'm also really glad that I had researched and planned our routes to get everywhere we needed to go. It helped a lot, but I couldn't have put it all together without Landon. Of course he didn't need the research, he could just look at a map and figure it out, but it was still nice to be somewhat prepared :)

We got to our flat and met our host, who was SO sweet. She offered us tea, gave us some shortbread cookies, and gave us tips about the area.

The flat was over 100 years old which was SO cool

I wish I took pictures before we trashed the place. It was very neat and tidy before we threw our stuff everywhere :)

Tiniest little kitchen :)

After settling in a bit, we went grocery shopping, made sandwiches, and then hopped back on the train to head into London! Our first stop was Cutty Sark, an old sailboat that we had to see of course. We ate lunch on the steps and people watched. I could've sat and listened to people talk all day... especially the kids! Oh, their accents are WAY too cute! Then we walked through the National Maritime Museum. Honestly, it was kind of boring for me but Landon really liked it :)

Such a beaut! :)

The National Maritime Museum. I couldn't get over all the cool buildings and architecture! 

We should consider adding one of these to Viking, don't you think?! 

After less than an hour in London... we were all pretty much ready to be done. Not only did we not get much sleep on the plane, but with the time change it was around 2 a.m. our time. We were EXHAUSTED to say the least. But, with only 3 days in England we knew we had to make the most of our trip. So we hopped back on the tube and headed to Hyde Park to see the Peter Pan statue. It was adorable and I absolutely LOVED walking through the cute park! 

I think I embarrassed Landon when I broke out in "feed the birds, tuppence a bag..." I couldn't help myself :)

Landon's favorite movie when he was little was Peter Pan, so these two HAD to get a picture in front of the statue! He used to pretend that he was Peter Pan and he would say to his mom, "c'mon Wendy, let's fly!" Pretty cute :)

Poor Landon slept the worst on the plane and ended up getting pretty sick. He was definitely ready to be done after our long walk through the tunnels and stairs navigating the tube and walking through the park. People in England are on average a lot skinnier and I know why! They don't really use elevators/escalators. They just walk up ten flights of stairs like it's no big deal. We had probably walked close to 5 miles at this point. The boys sat on the bench feeling miserable and we talked about just turning around and going home instead of going to Buckingham Palace (per my itinerary).

But, we pushed through the pain and walked another few miles through Hyde Park and London to see Buckingham Palace. Definitely a good choice!! It was actually smaller than I imagined, but it was SO cool and we loved watching the cute guards :) It was all unreal.

There was a little girl standing next to us at the gate who was asking her mom what the guards were doing. The mom explained that they were guarding the palace and the queen. The little girl kept repeating her question, "but what are they ACTUALLY doing?!" It was so funny and I couldn't get over her cute accent!!

After Buckingham Palace we walked to Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus. It was raining, getting dark, and pretty cold. We were pretty trashed at this point and after walking close to 10 miles and going off zero sleep we were SO ready to be done. We could hardly even enjoy our surroundings because we were basically zombies.

A bit of advice to anyone traveling to a far away place... take a day or even just half a day to catch up on SLEEP and relax a bit! We basically made ourselves sick after our crazy day of wandering around London... Oh well, you live, you learn!

We went right to sleep and ended up sleeping in WAY too late but, I'll save that for the next blog post :)