Crossing the Pond

During my recent trip to England, I managed to keep a pretty decent journal of what I saw and did...mostly so I would remember when it comes time to turn my photos into a scrapbook.  For anyone else who is reading and interested, here's how I spent the last two weeks!

I last visited London in the summer of 2009 and for the last two years the city has been beckoning me to return.  On Monday, July 11^th I hopped on a plane and headed across the pond for my third trip to the city on the Thames.  The first day (travel) was thankfully uneventful, although I did sit next to the French/German teacher from my high school during my first flight.  The eight hour trek from Calgary, Canada to London actually went by too fast and I didn’t manage to accomplish anything productive aside from watching a couple of movies.  When I landed at Heathrow on Tuesday I was on my own and forced to navigate the London Underground with a 45.5-pound suitcase, a 20-something pound backpack (worse to manage than the suitcase), a purse, and a trusty tube map.  Though exhausted and feeling quite nauseated from the lack of sleep and too much plane food, I found my residence for my five days in London.  Yes, I’ll ashamedly admit that my map reading and navigation skills leave a little something to be desired and it took me nearly twenty minutes and some back and forth traveling before I found the place, but I did it!!  I should also note that I took my learnings from previous trips and tried asking for help.  Unfortunately this failed, but alas, I learned how to orient a map.  It was too early to check into the hotel on Tuesday so I dropped off my luggage (stupidly kept the backpack, however) and meandered about the neighborhood…until the backpack became so heavy that I was forced to park myself on a bench.  Thankfully I had a second wind and found a Starbucks just a stones throw from my residence.  I thanked God profusely for this discovery and I have become a daily regular in order to enjoy a bit of home and make use of the free wifi.  I should never have checked into the hotel at 3pm as that’s when the time change hit me like a load of bricks and I committed the cardinal sin of traveling…I took a nap…a really long one.  I didn’t even get up to have dinner.  Here's where I crashed for the first five days of my trip.

London School of Economics:  Bankside House

It wasn't a posh hotel or even a quaint little hostel, but it was clean, had a bathroom in the room, and offered a full English breakfast every morning.  Not too bad for 77 pounds a night.  Plus, who goes to London just to hang out at the hotel?  Definitely not me!