The trip of a lifetime....

As I write this blog, my husband is being a busy bee working on projects all over the house. I, on the other hand, am on the couch. I just caught up on all the TV missed while we were on our trip (and a little sleep too.) I feel guilty that he is upstairs frustrated and yelling at a bathroom faucet he can't get fixed while I am enjoying a cold Dr. Pepper and chocolate I got in Italy. However, I think the break-neck speed of the honeymoon and walking back into month-end at work has gotten the best of me. So, I have decided to take it easy today and work on my projects tomorrow. So, how do I relax? (Other than good chocolate and 3 hours of "Glee".) I write my blog! So, without further adieu, I will begin to retell our European honeymoon, or The Trip of a Lifetime... 

The honeymoon began on Wednesday, May 4th. I tell you this now because by about Day 5, I couldn't have told you what country we had spent the night before in, let alone the date. We both had routine doctor appointments in the morning and ran several errands. Then we grabbed some lunch and headed to Houston. In order to get a direct flight and save us some money, we chose to fly out of Houston instead of Austin. This was only made possible by some wonderful members of my family. My Mom's cousin, Mike and his wife Stephanie agreed to not only let us park at their house, but Mike took us to the airport. (THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!)

We got settled into our seats and prepared for the 8 hour flight. We had been up VERY VERY late the night before preparing for the trip so we were running on only a few hours sleep. This helped a lot since we needed to sleep through most of our plane ride to be on track with London time when we arrived. We were both able to sleep for a few hours. We also had a surprisingly good dinner on board and watched a couple of movies. Before we knew it we had landed in London!! We were met by a representative for our tour company and loaded into a shuttle to our airport. As we drove on the other side of the road, seeing the funny little cars and unfamiliar street signs, it finally began setting in... we were in LONDON! 

This day would be a free day- without any scheduled tours, etc. So, we checked into our hotel and were in desperate need of some lunch. After a short walk from our hotel, we did our first London "must"... we ate lunch in a pub!! Brad played it safe with a hamburger and went traditional... fish 'n' chips!!

After a quick nap at the hotel, we decided to take advantage of our free time and take the Underground, or "Tube" into downtown London.

We had been given instructions by a hotel staff member and assured that our stop would take us directly to where we wanted to go... "you can't miss it". They couldn't have been more right. In fact, this will forever be one of the coolest memories for me... as we got off the train, there were a couple of ways to get out of the station and since we weren't sure which one, we guessed. As we walked up the stairs, we chatted about how we hoped we would be able to find our way around and as if on cue, the bells of Big Ben began ringing in the 7PM hour. As we emerged from the underground station, there was Big Ben- directly in front of us! It was awesome...

This was our view as soon as we emerged from the subway station.

We walked over the River Thames bridge to the London Eye. When I visited London over ten years ago with my parents, we didn't ride the Eye, so it was on my list of things I wanted to do during our trip. The London Eye is like a ferris wheel but MUCH larger. Each "pod" holds about 20 people and you can walk around inside of them. It takes about 30 minutes to go all the way around you have amazing views of London. We happened to time our trip around sunset and it was beautiful.

After the Eye, we walked around the city for a while. We walked by Westminster Abbey which just one week prior had been the site of the big Royal Wedding. In fact, there were workmen still taking down the bleachers constructed for the media coverage. All I could think about was how when I was there before, it was known to me as the place were they held Princess Diana's funeral... now it had a much happier memory attached.

It began to get late and we decided to make our way back to the hotel. We had missed dinner at the hotel restaurant and since we weren't very familiar with our other options, we went with something we knew... Subway!! As we grabbed our dinner to take back to the hotel, we did the math... we were now on 38 hours with only about 4 hours sleep! Needless to say, the next thing on the agenda was SLEEP! We had a busy day of sightseeing ahead.