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Published: December 27th 2010
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Hi everyone, sorry it's been a while, we have had many adventurous days over the past week but it is all part of the experience...
Tuesday 21st December - Day 81
Today we definitely were on a mission. Breakfast was included this morning, so we had the usual cereal, toast and juice. We had to finish the Monopoly photos from our last stay here, but we also had passes for the London Eye and the Tower of London, Jess won $100 worth of travel from Travel 2 (a wholesaler) for being in the Top 100 HWT Consultants so we thought we had better use it while we could. But first up we had to get some washing done and print off a few things for Egypt, we couldn't wash much other than by hand in Austria as it was really expensive (per piece) but we managed to keep it down to just one load, it helped that we wore almost the same thing everyday (ski gear)! There was a laundry about 2 mins from the hotel so we stopped off there and put a load on, then found a post office that printed from USB and we posted a couple of
postcards too. We went back to the laundry and put everything in the dryers, waited for 30 mins and took our nice clean clothes back to the hotel.
The closest Monopoly stop that we had left was Marylebone Station. We all know Mischa loves exercise, Jess just goes along with the flow... it has been a great saving and we have been able to see and experience most parts of the city that other tourists don't get to see, so no more complaining 😊. We walked to the station and got our photo, then caught the tube to Waterloo, the closest stop to the London Eye. We had pre-paid tickets but we had to exchange the voucher and give a time for our flight. We decided as the weather wasn't great that we would wait and do the flight at night, to see all the pretty lights... After we exchanged the tickets we decided that we would go see the Tower of London whil the day was still young, but by the time we got to Tower Hill tube station we were both feeling pretty hungry, luckily Mish found a Weatherspoon's just across the road from the ticket office, great
food, good value. After lunch we entered the Tower of London, a little city all of its own. Over the years it has been home to up to 10,000 people, although nowadays it is home to only 140. These 140 are the Yeoman and their families. We arrived with perfect timing (as always, not), only had to wait 2 - 3 mins for the guided tour to start. Our guide, Bob, was fantastic, he knew lots of facts and stories from the castle. The great thing about this place is that it is still being used today, it stores the Crown Jewels and many museums, unlike other ruins we have seen that are no longer what they used to be... We only spent about an hour and a half here as it was beginning to get really cold and dark, at 3:30pm...
We moved on to collecting the final photos for our Monopoly challenge, Angel Islington and King's Cross Station, now these stations are the National rail stations, not the tube stations so it requires a little bit of walking to actually find them! When we got to King's Cross / St. Pancras Stations we found HUGE lines of people
that went on for almost a block and a half, we didn't know what they were waiting for, Jess saw a news crew filming something and then later that night we saw the story on the news - the trains had stopped running on the East Coast of England so there were major delays. Euston Road and Bond Street completed the board. We also went back to Waterloo and enjoyed the ride on the London Eye, couldn't see too far due to cloud but the lights from Big Ben, Parliament House, County Hall and the close city buildings were great! Our final destination was a quick stop at the Winter Wonderland Festival in Hyde Park. We didn't know what to expect but we had seen a ferris wheel from the London Eye, when we got there we browsed the side-show rides and smelled the sweet Christmas sweets, hot chocolate, churros, hot dogs, pretzels as we wandered for a little bit. As we didn't want to spend too much money and Jess wasn't really into any thrill rides we wandered our way across Hyde Park, hoping to come out close to our street. Unfortunately the park is a lot bigger than
we imagined and we still had to walk for a good 30 mins before getting to the right place. On the way we stopped at a buffet restaurant, The Pizza Factory, for a quick bite, or in Mischa's case 8 slices of pizza!
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