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48 Hours in the UK
Our ferry arrived at Holyhead, and then we took a couple of trains to Birmingham. We played Tabitha's dice game and enjoyed the scenery.
The locals laughed at us when we took the picture of the sign announcing the name of the town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. I guess they don't really appreciate that there aren't towns named like that all over the place. Look at the second picture below and see if I got the spelling right.
I was glad to make use of the various train songs on my ipod, such as Arlo Guthrie's City of New Orleans, and Bruce Cockburn's Night Train, and a few others.
I didn't take any pictures after Birmingham. We arrived in London's Victoria Station and walked to our B&B. By chance our German friend Peter was in town for business, so he came over to meet us at the Mexican restaurant. I took a picture of it on the next day, and you can see it below. The next one over from the Mexican place is the Pasty Shop, though I only took the picture to note the name. The first picture below is the B (breakfast) portion of our B&B. We told the manager that we were planning to take the bus tour and see Buckingham Palace, and he told us that he could sell us tickets. At first I was a bit skeptical, worried that the tickets might cost more. We decided to take the chance of trusting him and paid for both the bus and the palace. We found out later that they were actually the same price as they would have been on site, and we were able to save quite a bit of time waiting in line.
The orignal bus tour is a hop-on hop-off sort of arrangement, which was perfect for us. We took a ride first to the company headquarters so that we could join a walking tour to see the changing of the guard.
Our walking tour went past several notable sites, and the guides were good at pointing them out to us. They told us about the various branches of the military, but I wasn't really able to remember them all.
As you can see below, we watched the horse group go to the Friary, which is apparently where the royal family lived a long time ago. We waited for a couple of minutes until a band came out and played "singing in the rain."
The band continued down the road and we followed them over to the palace. There were quite a few people there to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Our tour guide said that it wasn't really worth seeing under those circumstances, and that we could get a better view at a less-crowded changing a few blocks down.
So here we are at our less crowded location. You can see the changing sequence as the red guys relieve the black ones.
We were soon back on the bus to get to Buckingham Palace.
They didn't let us take any pictures inside, so we just took a few pictures of the grounds. We tried to find some local food, but the best we could do was Lebanese.
The rest of the pictures below are some of the tourist sites that we saw on the bus ride.
The next four pictures are of the walk back to our B&B, with the last one being the entrance. We weren't staying there for the last night, but he was able to keep our bags for us. Christina had to go to Heathrow for her trip home the next day, and we were going to leave from Gatwick.
Since we were splitting up, we wouldn't need the triple room. Instead we decided to try and stay close to the airport some internet research pointed us to the Yotel, which is the hotel inside the airport. They have a branch at both airports, so we all decided to try it out. Below you can see pictures that we took of ours. The mood lighting made it seem even more surreal than it would have been.
Staying at the Yotel turned out to be a great idea. It was relatively inexpensive, at about $100 for the night, and the next morning we just woke up and walked to the check-in counter. It took a lot of the stress out of getting to the airport in the wee hours. We left on our direct CLT flight and made it home with seats together again. It had been 25 days since Tabitha had first left, and we were both glad to be headed home.
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