Day 1 continued

Again, a nice landing in London. I’m always really concerned about take offs and landings, so I was extremely grateful there were no problems. We collected our luggage, went through customs, got our passports stamped, and headed out to find our hotel shuttle. And there was the nice Trafalgar man waiting for us.

By this time, it was about 10:00 a.m.

We had to wait in the airport for about an hour while other people catching the shuttle got off their flights. Then, we were off. Gatwick airport, by bus, is about an hour outside of London. The ride in was beautiful and since I had slept the entire plane ride over, I was wide awake and taking it all in. We arrived at the Hilton Olympia in Kensington around 1:00 p.m. We got checked in, talked to a tour representation to get all the details for the next morning, and decided to venture off into the city.

Our initial thought was to take a cab into London, but after thinking about it for a minute, we decided we wanted to take the Tube. We found out which line to take, where the nearest station was, and headed off.

We got to the Tube station and stood on what we thought was the correct platform. There were some business men speaking German next to us and they asked me which platform they were supposed to be on. I just acted like I knew what I was talking about and told them they were in the correct spot. Turns out, we weren’t. We got on a train and realized at the first stop we were going in the wrong direction. So Kelly, myself, and the German men got off and then got on the right train.

Our first stop was the Tower of London.

That's the Tower of London over there.

Since we had tickets later that evening for The Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, we thought it best that we found where we were supposed to go first so there wouldn’t be any surprises that evening. Lucky for us, the Tube stop was right at the Tower. We walked around for awhile, went to the Tower Bridge and took some pictures.

The Bridge

View of London from the Bridge.