Colorado Cruiser: England "Guys Trip" Days 1 and 2

In the first part of 2007, my friend Mike called me. He said that he had allot of frequent flyer miles and wanted to go on a trip somewhere and wanted to know if I'd go with him. He offered to use his miles to pay my airfare. We talked for a while about where to go. Mike was originally thinking about Hawaii, but I'm taking my wife there in 6 months for our 25th anniversary.

Through RCI I could get decent lodgings in Mexico or Brazil, but neither of us speak spanish, and neither have any travel experience, so in the end, we decided to go to England and France.

Just a few days before we were to leave, a letter arrived from some friends in Arizona. Their daughter's class had read a book about "Flat Stanley". They wanted to know if we would take their daughter's Flat Stanley to a few places around Colorado Springs and take pictures. I had no idea what the story was, but I was willing to take it with me to England and take pictures.

We flew out early in March of 2007. Mike from Salt Lake, me from Denver, and we met up in Cincinnati for the crossing to London. Mike has pretty high status with Delta, so we went into the Delta lounge to wait for our flight. As we boarded the plane, we each took a sleeping pill. I had purchased a set of active noise reducing ear phones which reduced the airplane noise by about half. We slept all the way to London so that as we got off the plane, it really did feel like morning. We didn't suffer from jetlag much except when we stayed up really late.

We arrived on a Sunday. We checked into our Mariotte hotel, then took the underground down to Portabello Road in Notting Hill. Most places were closed. We wandered the shops looking at fake antiques (and maybe the occasional real antique). For lunch we found Pakistani fast food. It was a small buffet with chicken, rice, and a sort of curry. It was different and good.

Next we headed for Covent Gardens. That's a large covered shopping area. I found a nice telescope to buy for Kyle. We saw allot of "Guys Suck" tee-shirts that Kadi and Klair would have liked. In the end I bought them T-shirts with velcro on the front and letters to stick on so they could make their own sayings.
I looked for a "Beckham" soccer jersey for my grandson, but he's not very popular in England right now. In fact when I mentioned that my 4 month old grandson was named Beckham, the guy just shook his head and muttered something about stupid Yanks.

Next we took the underground down by Parliment. We took a few pictures by Big Ben,

I told Mike about the little paper doll, but I couldn't remember the name. I pulled out the paper doll and Mike held it up while I took photos. While we were taking the photos a group walked past and someone chuckled and said "Look, they have a Flat Stanley". That was my first indication that Stanley was a worldwide thing.

We walked around the streets a bit. But because it's Sunday we didn't get to go into many things. We walked around Picadilly Circus. I noticed that the theatres were just opening a new movie called "The Comeback", but in the US, the movie is called "Music and Lyrics". I'd never known that many movies carry different titles in Europe.

That night Mike wanted to go to the oldest continuing restauraunt in London. http://www.rules.co.uk/ The name of the restaurant is Rules. It was established in 1798 and has continued to run since then. The food was is very basic british, and it's very good. Mike ordered a whole Yorkshire pudding to try, but it was so big we didn't finish it. We did buy small bottles of soda which cost about $5.00 each.

Day 2 - Monday

On Monday we started with a $40.00 breakfast at the Mariotts. I hadn't stayed in many Marriots before, so I thought the breakfast was complimentary. Imagine my suprise when they handed Mike a bill for over 20 pounds. I figured we didn't need breakfast in the hotel anymore. Our first stop for the day was the London Harley Davidson store to buy t-shirts. Those were also expensive, and Mike told me just to think of it as "Pounds for Dollars", even though a pound is worth almost twice as much as a dollar. So that 12 pound T-shirt was really a 24 dollar T-shirt.

After the Harley Shop we went into Westminster Cathedral. They don't allow any photography. We got audible tour devices and walked around. Every hour they stop all touring and give a prayer, and every 2 hours they hold a religious service at one end of the Cathedral. At one end sits the official corrination throne of England. It's just a fairly plain wooden chair with allot of grafiti on it. In years past, the chair just sat in a corner and anyone who wanted could sit in it and even write or carve their name in it, and they did.
We started looking for somewhere to eat, and a guard at Westminster recommended the Methodist Hall across the street. It was crowded and didn't look that great so we started wandering around.

We found a small pub near Westminster to have lunch. We descended a narrow staircase to the basement and set it a cramped booth. We kept waiting for a waitress until the bar tender told us we had to order at the bar. We got plain pub food with fish & chips & beans. It was pretty good.

After lunch we went to the Winston Churchill museum. http://churchillmuseum.iwm.org.uk/ It is in the underground Cabinet War Rooms that Churchill used throughout World War II and includes allot of the original equipment, maps, and furniture. There is also a very sophisticated computerized tables where you can look at Churchill's life day by day and see what he was doing and how the war was going. The tour of the museum is done via an electronic recording that you punch in a number and hold to your ear.

After the museum we went to Harrods to shop for some gifts to bring back home. I found a neat Dr Who doll to bring back for my 3 year old granddaughter Sydnee. Koren hates that Rex and I have gotten Sydnee hooked on Dr Who so the doll with a little K9 robot doll are a perfect gift.

For dinner we took the tube out to a suburb of London. Right by the tube station was a little flower shop so I decided to buy flowers. The shop owner didn't have a magnetic stripe reader to use my credit card. She said she hadn't seen a mag stripe card in several years. Everything in Europe has switched to embedded chips in the credit cards. Luckily we had enough cash to buy the flowers.

After that, we got a cab out to the retirement flat of a lady that I know named Randi. She made a wonderful salad and lamb dinner for us. We chatted for several hours about my family and hers.

I'm not sure why I didn't take many pictures those first 2 days, but I didn't.

Sitting in the Delta lounge at the Cincinnati airport waiting to fly to London