London - Day 1

Today was pretty much a continuation of yesterday since our attempts to sleep on the flight went unfulfilled except for a few minutes here or there.  Can you believe they serve a full dinner on a flight that leaves at midnight!?  The flight was uneventful in a good way.  Our landing and takeoff were some of the smoothest I'd ever felt.  After grabbing our bag we proceeded to the Tube and the short trip to our West end hotel.  Benny(owner of Benny's B&B) was there to greet us and bring us up to our top floor room.  The area where our hotel is is a nice, quiet suburb of London recommended to us by friends.  Its about a half hour Tube ride into central London.  Our room is small and sparse but clean and the bed is comfortable.  It was now 1200pm London time but only 7am Ottawa time so we decided to catch a few zzz's before heading out.  It was really hard to get up but we managed to be out the door again by 3pm.

First stop iconic Buckingham Palace!  We didn't see the Queen but there were a few guards standing out front.  We then walked down The Mall, a long tree lined boulevard where processions from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace go.  As we walked it started to rain.  We had raincoats so we were still able to walk around for quite a bit without getting too soggy.  We walked through Leicester square, Trafalgar square, Piccadilly circus and even came across Saville Row.  Along the way we noticed how well dressed Londoners are and also how many people were out and about despite the rain.  We had dinner at a small cafe just off the main drag.  Reuben had a chicken and mushroom pie with chips(fries) and I had spaghetti and salad.  We both enjoyed our meals including the price tag:-)

To get out of the rain, we thought we would check out the British Museum which is free.  We hoped it would be open after 6pm and it was but only because it was a Friday night.  So we lucked out.  We saw many ancient artifacts, a cool clock/watch exhibit and a Japanese history exhibit.

After all this walking around on not very much sleep we thought we should end the day with a pint at the local pub so we hoped on the Tube back to our hotel, had our pint and are both ready to hit the hay, for real!