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Well we're finally here, the flight was tiring, and I ended up getting a bit sick whilst waiting for the plane to land in London - apparently all the planes go into a holding pattern which means they take a bloody long time to land!!! We even had a blast of lightning right when we were about to land, quite freaky...
Anyway the last few days have been really eventful - we caught the Tube to Astrid and Gareth's place which is pretty cool and easily reachable by train. Completely buggered that night and meet up with Ron the next day for a day around London. Photos should be here... London is amazing and there are countless places to go, things to see, it was difficult to fit as much as we can into the limited time we are going to be here. Our first official day was spent walking everywhere, from St Paul's Cathedral (which was absolutely amazing though the stairs up to the top were a bit hard on the legs) to London Bridge, Tower of London, Trafalger Square, Covent Gardens, Oxford Street, Picadilly Circus and finally ended up at Chinatown for a cheap dinner which didn't end
Trafalger Square
View towards National Gallery up being that cheap, or that nice!!! Everything else was completely amazing and the architecture, infrastructure and life of this city completely took our breath away. We only took a brief look at Tower of London because the queues were so long - so we plan to go back there in the next few days, perhaps queue up the night before!!!
Yesterday we took a day trip outside of London with Astrid and Gareth - Though they had seen Windsor Castle already, they came with us to see the town whilst we explore the castle. The queue to get in was almost an hour wait, but it was worth it, though we missed out on seeing the Queen's Doll's Room due to lack of time. We had hired a car that day to drive to Windsor for a few hours followed by a trip to Bath to see the Roman Baths. Bath is incredible, I can't describe it in words, the buildings are so neatly built and the streets and laneways are incredibly immaculate and symmetrical. Unfortunately we missed out on seeing the Roman Baths by only a minute or two which was soooo annoying because we were really
Trafalger Square
Ron & Adrian in front of the monuments in Trafalger Square looking forward to it (yes today was a day of missing out on some things)... however, the Bath Abbey made up for this and the rest of Bath was so incredible that we ended up leaving without any regret. We were late getting back to return the car in time, so had to stop by a little fish and chip store which probably had the worst service we've ever encountered. Pretty much everything Adrian ordered wasn't available and in the end he was forced to buy a medium battered cod which didn't end up being that nice.. just his luck as usual!!
Today was a slower day, which is what we wanted after two days of scrambling around a bit. We took the national rail train to Walton on Thames to visit Michael and June, Adrian's uncle and aunt. Their house is quite small but pretty cosy and Michael was kind enough to take us to his allotment (a 9.5 acre land owned by the council and rented out to the residents for gardening). This place is Michael's baby and it's pretty amazing how big and plentiful the vegies/fruits are there. Michael basically spends every day there maintaining the
lot and this feeds them throughout the year. We also drove past where Michael grew up as well as the pub he got kicked out of a few times. Lastly we saw the Thames there which was so pretty, where locals go to feed the ducks and have their lunch. We were hoping tonight will be an early one, but we're now on the internet writing this blog whilst waiting for our laundry to be done (a minor drama in itself). It's 10.30pm now and Adrian looks like he's about to collapse, maybe it's old age... so I better stop here and go get the laundry.
Enjoy the photos, we'll try to post more when we can!
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