European/UK Holiday 2009 - London Day 1

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My first trip overseas & my first long haul flight. Needless to say, after an hour stop over in Singapore & arriving at Heathrow at 6am in the morning, I was in desperate need of a shower AND sleep!

They don't tell you how hard it is to heave your luggage through Heathrow & onto the Tube! There are a dozen escalators and entry points with bollards in the way... if your luggage is wide, it ain't going through. I found myself looking around to see if you are actually allowed to take your luggage to the Tube Station. If you're wondering, you are... of course you are! You just have the heave your luggage over the bollards and hope you back doesn't break in the process.

However, after having no problems getting an Oyster Card (card with prepaid amount of money used to travel the metro system) I found myself happily awaiting a train to Central London. Unlike Melbourne, trains are frequent, so we only waited about 5 min. There was lots of room to sit and put the luggage, although once we were half way to London, peak hour hit and we found our bags being squashed up against us!

Once off the platform at Russell Square, we headed to the exit, where a lift took us to the top and London greeted us with some lovely drizzling rain! Luckily we were too tired to care and the walk was only 5 or so minutes to the hotel.

As we were early (11am) for check in at the Royal National Hotel, we left our bags and decided to take a walk and have a look around. We soon found ourselves walking across the Thames and looking across to Big Ben! What a sight, was still hard to believe I was overseas, in a foreign country!

We ate lunch near the Thames, were I quickly discovered that 'mayo' was quite a staple on many foods, if not a bottle on the table sitting along side the ketchup and salt and pepper.

We soon stumbled across Covent Gardens Market which was a great place, bands playing music and the smell of different foods wafting around. We walked through the theatre district on the way back to the Royal National Hote where the line for check in was escalating out the door!

A cool 30min later we were taking the journey up to our rooms.... drum roll please...... what a lovely room... NOT!! I have to say I probably let my expectations get a little high. Beds had a huge sag in them and they were terribly uncomfortable. Decor was depressing and bathroom was average. We had a view of the street though. Can't say first impressions of London were going that well.

We had time for a quick nap, before our 6pm Contiki meeting at the Coffee Shop downstairs. The meeting was to brief us on what to expect the next morning and get our passports, papers in order. And we met our Tour Manager John Barleyman (JB) and Tour Driver, Atilla. By this time we were exhausted, so we headed to a Spaghetti Restaurant we had seen in our earlier walk, and picked up some water and nibblies from the convenience store for the trip the next day.

By the time we got back to the hotel, we hardley noticed the uncomfortable beds because we were so exhausted. Before we knew the alarms were going off and it was time to start our Contiki European Adventure!

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