to the Bus - watch out London!

 The tour was COLD! We sat on the open top just behind the last covered seat as we could still take pictures and still be covered. We brought our own headphones to listen to the pre-recorded audio guide. Not bad. Can't remember any of it, but here's some really great pictures. :)

  

tallest building in London

 It was so impressive the amount of people walking and hurrying about. The architecture and everything was just amazing to us small town country kids. :)

 O Canada!

 Beatles of course.

 Waldorf Hotel

 The amount of buses everywhere was crazy! These aren't the tour buses either, this is public transportation. This was just in front of us, there were at least 5 more visible behind us.

 St. Pauls Cathedral was beautiful! The famous Whispering gallery was pretty cool - although slightly terrifying for me on the worn down path, WAY up high in the dome. The dome seen above is not the actual dome seen inside the church. Do some fact checking it's an incredible building. Construction was being done on the inside of the dome so we couldn't go any higher.....and no pictures inside. That this building even still exists is a miracle. 

source : The iconic St Paul's Survives taken on 29 December 1940 of St Paul's during The Blitz

 waiting to hop-on another tour bus after St Pauls Cathedral

Approaching Tower Bridge - not to be confused with London Bridge.

 Looking back to the Tower Bridge from the Tower of London

 More on these sites in the next post - this was just what we saw from the bus. I tried to find more picture of our sites in London, but a lot were not to be photographed and we spend a lot of time walking and taking the underground....one time went all the way out to the Imperial War museum that was closed until July - he told us we could come back then.....not so much. There was more stuff we should have planned to go see and because I had cost us dearly on the train tickets to get to London, we gave up visits to Bath, Stonehenge, other sites outside of London. I'm actually okay with that though - those sites were stressing me out before we even left for Europe. Although there was a plane museum I would have like to have gone too, but didn't know about until we arrived at the Imperial war museum and the guide said it would be an all-day trip. We only had a few hours the next day.

Phone booths, guards - London style

 The Queen was out on holiday for Easter weekend, no visit with her, but we got to enjoy the outside of her palace for a few minutes before continuing our walk to de-stress and enjoy the cold weather. Wow, cold!

a look back at the palace and large round-a-bout statue

a ways down the main street to the palace, there was these 2 guards.....guarding the Queen's garden.

a look at the London Eye

 a guard for the horses stable - they do a lesser known changing of the guards here, unfortunately at the same time as the big changing of the guards ceremony at the palace.

 haha, I'm a dork.

 Jeff I think made him smirk asking him if he was cold or made some sarcastic comment about being cold.

Now to the phone booth - this one smelled like urine.....which makes Jeff's picture all that much more gross for him. :)

 Piccadilly Square

Original Sight-seeing London tour bus

Day 1 - after that day - in London.

We bought passes for the Original London sightseeing hop-on-hop-off tour company and along with it came a free cruise on the Thames River. I didn't think we'd use that, so off we set on the bus tour. We took the red and yellow bus lines to get where we wanted.

Wahoo! Bring on the coats, hats, gloves, layers, and more layers of clothing - it's 32 degrees with a chance of snow flurries!!!!

that day

There's always that day - that one time during any trip (or at least on the amazing race, biggest loser, survivor, etc) where there's a melt down, a break down, a falling apart. The perfect day suddenly becomes the worst day? Yeah that one. The one where everyone is crying, yelling, screaming, silently cursing (sometimes it audible), I miss my kids, I want to go home, take the wrong turn and end up in Italy instead of Germany? Well we didn't end up in Germany or Italy, but we didn't end up in London at the time we were supposed to either.

We decided (before we left) to take the Eurostar - the train under the Chunnel to the UK. I had looked at that ticket a thousand times and read it correctly and even told Jeff the right time. The one time I didn't look at it right cost us. And cost us big time. BIG TIME. We went out for breakfast and had a traditional Paris breakfast which happen to be Palm Sunday. We had croissants, jellies, juice, hot chocolate, bread, fruit bowl and milk. YUMMY! We left the restaurant and walked out to the St. Germain church again.

 They were selling Palms out in front of the church and asking for donations. We took a quick tour around the church to realize we had already been there before. :) Then went back to the hotel for our stuff. We arrived at the train station, couldn't find our train time, re-checked the tickets and here's where the day went from relaxing and chilled, to crappy and horrible in about 2 seconds. Not only did we arrive at the wrong time, but the train had already left........an hour ago.

$600+, 2 tickets, one angry husband, one horrible embarrassed and terrified wife later, we boarded a train to the UK. Jeff slept the whole way, I tried to figure out how to fix the error I had made. 

While I did that, I took pictures of the French countryside speeding by.

I'm not sure how I got this picture....but we took a somewhat happy photo on the underground.
 this is the underground station we arrived at in the London - so awesome! not awesome was Jeff's card being declined as we tried to buy our passes for all the tourist sites.

 We finally arrive at our hotel in the London only to find out our room was not ready and they were going to upgrade us - sweet.......apparently upgrade in London does not mean the same as in the US. Bigger room, yes. Bigger bathroom, yes. Okay so far so good. 3 beds, no. Basement floor - definitely no. Free internet - nope, used the wrong site to book the room, have to pay for internet. I'm sorry - where's the upgrade?

We found a place to eat not before all that crying was done by me, apologizing, and wanting to go home so I didn't screw anything else up and cost us more money. I felt really bad, Jeff was understandably upset and well we would have made every highlight for 2 weeks before this episode would have aired.

At dinner, Jeff paid the waitress and was never brought any change back......she never even came back to the table after taking our money. Luckily he didn't over pay her very much or I'm not sure what would have happened.

so to re-cap:

missed eurostar train

$600+ for new tickets

card declined at the London train station for much needed tourist passes/underground passes

upgrade at the hotel - not an upgrade

free internet - not free

not an awesome day.

we agreed to move on.

Crepes - yummy crepes

 Our amazing Concierge left us the address of her favorite Crepe place. We headed there for dinner when we got back from Versailles. It's called Little Breizh. Big enough for 10 small tables and a kitchen open to the whole place. We arrived and had to wait about 15 minutes for a table. While we ate, at least 20 more people came and left because of the wait for another table. Popular little place and the food was amazing! Having only heard of dessert crepes, we had no idea there were dinner crepes too. Not knowing if we could order just the dessert, we looked around and quickly observed the other customers and decided to order dinner and dessert crepes. Delicious! Muah!

I was impressed with the staff: the brother cooking and making everything, doing the dishes too. And the sister - waiting tables, taking payments and clearing tables too. They kept that place moving and all the customers were happy as can be. I wish we had eaten more crepes and desserts there. :)

 maple ice cream, caramel sauce and brown sugar - with 2 marshmallow bears - I ate 1. :)

 this is how they park.....and I wanted to know how they did it without ruining any other vehicles around them. This car actually had space to move - others were literally bumper to bumper.

 Motorcycles lining the sidewalk .

 Lucky for us, this guy decided to show us how to park like Parisians. :)

 

 as to not looking like we were stalking the guy parking his car, we posed for a self portrait. :)