Day 1 - Arriving in London

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At around 8:30am (London Time) we arrived in England. We were funneled into customs and sat in line for about an hour while 5 people processed about 250 people waiting in line. The customs agent asked us a lot of questions about why were visiting London, so I can only image how long it took others who were not on holiday. Finally we make it out of customs and luckily our car was still waiting for us even though we were about an hour and a half later than we thought. Unfortunately, our driver was relying on his GPS to get us to the hotel and the GPS did not account for all of the "closed" roads because of the weekend. It took us another hour and a half to get to our hotel. The good news is we did get to see some of the London sites while we were traveling to our hotel.

Finally we arrived at the hotel, London Hilton at the Docksides, which was very nice, but they did not have our room quite ready yet. Therefore we sat in the bar and relaxed while we were waiting for our room. We took the opportunity to take some pictures with Classic Pooh for our first day in London.

Later, after checking into our room, we decided to hit the Tube and check our some of the sites. The concierge walked us to the a small convenience store so we could buy our Tube tickets and showed us the bus stop that would take us to the Tube. Unfortunatley, I did not realize we were about 3 miles away from a Tube stop when I reserved the rooms. Therefore, we had to take a bus to the Tube and then we were on our way.

We decided to check our Harrod's on our first day, but since it was Saturday, it was a bit of a zoo. We walked around a bit, but soon grew tired of the crowds and decided to head back to the hotel. Unfortunately it was raining on and off and Jonathan and I were both tired and cranky, so the journey back to the hotel was RATHER long. We needed to reload our Tube pass, but didn't have any cash. So we had to walk about a 1/2 mile away to a small mall, but the first ATM would not work. It pretty much denied our card. So we walked inside to another machine and it did the same thing. Finally we used a card from a different bank and it worked. Then we walked back to the bus station, recharged our Tube cards and then had to wait about 25 minutes for the bus. We were definitely very tired and cranky by this time.

Fortunately we had noticed a small pub near our hotel, so we decided to get some dinner there. Especially since we were cold and wet at the time.

The pub was very nice. It was just us and one other guy to start with in the pub, but the lady waiting on us was very nice. I had "Fish and Chips" and Jonathan had a nice mince pie. It was definitely "bar food" but quite tasty and WARM!

After our dinner, we walked back to the hotel and had a nice nightcap in the hotel bar. We knew we had to get up for our Stonehenge tour the next day, so we made a night of it pretty early.

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