June 16 & 17, 2010 Goodby Texas, Hello London (maria)

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Its Wednesday and today we depart Austin for Heathrow (via Houston). Our children's entire anxiety about the trip is relieved when we discover that Yes! Our overnight Continental flight has TV monitors in the back of each seat. ( I can barely restrain my desire to thump their heads.) We arrive in London around 9:30 am Thursday morning without incident. Jet lagged and mildly confused, we take the less scenic underground route to Holborn (passing through many of the poshest tube stops - Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, etc.) At Holborn, we transfer to Liverpool Street Station in order to catch the train north to the small historic town of Harwich.

We plan to stay in Harwich and catch the Friday overnight Stena ferry to Hoek van Holland, The Netherlands. When we check into our Harwich hotel on Thursday mid-day, the receptionist sympathetically said “So, you’ll be stuck here for the whole day tomorrow, eh?" I thought, "Hey, Christopher Jones, the Captain of the Mayflower was from here! Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock, and all that!" Well, turns out, there IS not much to see in Old Harwich... and what is there, is not that easy to get to... We taxi to the old town where there were a couple of lighthouses, a row of very cute, brightly colored little tiny beach huts, and a soccer field for the boys. I took a brisk, cold and gale force windy walk along the esplanade and circled back through town to the soccer field, enduring the stares of many natives at my Sketchers. We ate dinner at very nice restaurant called Treo and then taxied back to the hotel for World Cup soccer. **Todays Observation - I discovered my new camera is broken so I took some pictures with my BB but have not figured out how to upload them.

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