england trip #2 – london

Yes, it’s Part 2 in the Series That Will Drag On For Years! In which Edna and Kim Tour England. Part I, featuring the Suitcase From Hell, is one entry back. In this edition, we have said a temporary goodbye to Suitcase From Hell, as it gets stowed in Kim’s London bedroom closet for the week. And she parts with a bunch of clothes in the hopes that it will be less hellish on the return trip — our host offered to take them to the Salvation Army, or its equivalent, for her. She still doesn’t know what she was thinking. Other than the garganto-suitcase seemed like a good idea at the time, and everyone had told her that you could pack everything you own and it STILL wouldn’t be over 50 pounds, because it takes a WHOLE LOT of stuff to hit 50 pounds! I didn’t tell her that, but I would have if it had occurred to me — because I’d done a test when we went to Charleston in August or September or whenever it was we went. My suitcase was so heavy I thought it HAD to be like, oh, 80 pounds! I weighed it, and it was 34 pounds. Apparently I need to do some weight-training. But my point was, I’d have told her the same thing– “Oh, no WAY can you end up with more than fifty pounds of stuff!”

Hahahahahaha!!

Oh, well, water under the bridge for sure. And Kim learned her lesson about international travel and great big suitcases. Sadly, as we remarked often, it wasn’t one of those lessons you could just learn and move on from. It was one of those lessons in which the repercussions followed her the entire trip, taunting her. Over and over. She learned her lesson in the first ten minutes of the trip but had to keep paying for it for the next two weeks.

BUT for the London week, the suitcase got to be stored away. Hooray! And we got to tour London!

And did we tour London! We did not stop. Before the trip we bought London Passes, which we had really debated over, not being sure if it would be worth it or not. Now I’d totally recommend it, if you’re going to be there for a week and you get the travel pass too. It took away all the agonizing over what should we do, what should we see, what’s worth paying for, what’s not worth paying for…. etc etc. A whole lot of stuff is included – WAY more than we got to do. But what we did do, plus the unlimited tube and ferry use (and bus, although we never did take a bus, sadly) made it worth it. Stratford was also out of the Oyster Pass zone, so the travel card, which covers all six zones, really saved us from huge tube costs. The only attraction we paid to see outside the London Pass fee was the London Eye. Everything else, our admission was covered. Since we were trying to do London on the cheap, we would have had a hard time deciding what was worth admission. Of course a whole lot of stuff is free, and next time I’ll probably stick to the free stuff. I loved just walking around. But for this trip, the pass was great, and we got to REALLY be tourists.

SO. We started off Monday morning, walking to the Stratford tube station.

I really liked the neighborhood. Lots of weird old stuff.

You may not be able to read it, but on the left side of the building below there’s a sign that says “Home of Iron Maiden”. Odd.

Stratford is VERY close to where the Olympics will be held in 2012. I think actually it is technically in Stratford. I can’t believe that despite taking over 3000 pictures, I apparently did not get a single picture of the Olympics building site cranes you can see as you walk to the tube station.

The first Touristy Site we visited was The Tower of London!

This guy totally did not look real. Even his skin looked plastic. However, he did march off at one point, so if he was an android, he was a very good one.

There’s basically a whole town- or what once was a whole town- inside the walls of the Tower of London. So there is a huge variety of buildings all over the place. These look like apartments.

There were also helpful instructions on what to do in case of enemy attack. Or rat attack. First of all, I’d put some clothes on.

And of course you have to tour Henry III’s bedchamber.

Nice views, too.

Next up, hopefully quicker than this went up — crossing Tower Bridge and walking around on the other side of the Thames!