England!

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Hey all! Kate here, typing to you from England!

We arrived in London at about 11:30 AM on June 13. Our plane left late because of quite a few problems. (Ian, I'm sure you can imagine how I felt about that situation, hahaha), one of which was that they couldn't turn the cabin lights off. So we flew the entire 10+ hours with ALL of the lights on. Impossible to sleep. That day, we took the bus into the tourist-y part of town which included Westminster Abby, Big Ben, Parliament, and the London Eye. It took us over an hour to get there from our hotel because we had NO idea how the bus system worked and couldn't find the underground. Oh well, it was quite an adventure. After that, we went back to our room and crashed around 9 PM. Wakeup call happened at 5:45 AM and we were out of the hotel and on the bus by 7:15 AM.

Our tour is about 45 people large, we fill up the bus. Our guide is quite nice and his accent is soothing...it makes me want to sleep though, haha. We left London and drove into Stratford upon Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace. We got to visit his childhood home, and the church where he was baptized and is buried. All very cool, a really pretty little town. There is a river/lake running through it and many of the restaurants were small boats on the river.

After that, we drove into Coventry, where we visited the Twin Cathedrals. One cathedral was bombed in 1914 and so they built a new one next to it. Very interesting, and I climbed up a crap load (excuse my french) of stairs to the top of the cathedral which was pretty cool, and a great workout.

After Coventry, we came to York, where we are now. We saw the Yorkminster Cathedral, which was huge, and some castle ruins. The city was very picturesque, and it was also very posh. There was a Starbucks literally 100 feet from a tower that was part of an old castle from a thousand years ago. It was funny to see all the residents strolling around the shopping center as if completely oblivious to the gigantic landmark in front of them.

Now we are still in York. We had a welcome dinner/drink at a cute little pub here. I'm trying to upload pictures but the internet is VERY slow, and my pictures are pretty big so I'm not sure it'll work. I'll try though! I guess you'll be able to tell if I'm successful by whether or not there are pictures in this entry, haha.

Hope all is well in the states (and Canada, for Mark and Lisa!). Tomorrow we head to Edinburg, Scotland. Take care!!

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