Thursday, August 30, 2012

Let me start by saying that I am totally exhausted today!

We left Paris today for London.  We had someone to pick us up at the hotel around 9:45 this morning.  They took us to the train station in Paris.  We were riding the Eurostar to Paris.  After we got to the train station, we found the track we were leaving from.  Of course we had to go upstairs with our luggage.  Once upstairs we had to fill out immigration forms for going to the UK.  Going through security there was much easier than you have to go through at the airport.

Once they let us board the train, we had to go back downstairs.  Once we found our car we had to load our luggage.  If it hadn't been for Terry I would probably still be there trying to get my 48 pound bag up the stairs.  We got the luggage loaded and found our seats.  We had a table for 4 which was nice.  Soon after we left the train station we decided to go get something to eat since we probably wouldn't have time to eat in London when we got there.

Pat and Terry were in front of us in line to order and for those of you that don't know Pat, she usually orders 1 of everything so it took a while for them to get their order.  I didn't dare to turn around and look at the line to see if people were glaring.  However, when I ordered my food, it went very quick.

After eating we just sat there and enjoyed the ride.  The trip passed by quickly.  When we got to London we had someone to meet us and take us to the hotel.  The train station was huge and I think we must have had to walk a mile to get to their car.  Once in the car, traffic was terrible but we finally got to our hotel and were able to check in and take our things to our room.

We are only in London for less than 24 hours and we had 3 things planned.  We had tickets to ride the London Eye, After hours tour of Buckingham Palace (5:00-7:30), and the Key Ceremony at the Tower of London (9:30-10:05).  We were told that it wasn't possible to do all 3 in one day, but we proved them wrong.  We didn't get to our hotel until about 2:00 and we accomplished it all.

We took public transportation to everything.  The traffic seemed to be so bad that we thought the public transportation would be faster and I think it probably was.  We got back to our hotel around 8:00 and decided to get a quick bite to eat before the Keys Ceremony.  The service was so slow, we were almost late.  We didn't get our food until 9:00 and we ate it in about 10 minutes.  We were lucky that the Tower of London was only about a 10 minute walk from our hotel.

After the Key Ceremony, we came back to our hotel.  When we checked in they had given us free drinks in the bar on top of the hotel.  We decided to go check it out.  The views were really nice but we were really too tired to enjoy it.

I am now back in my room trying to get this blog done so I can go to bed.  We are taking the train to port tomorrow.  Once on the ship, I hope to get some rest.  However, we do have ports the first 4 days and we have tours planned at each port.

I will try to have enough energy to post some pictures in the morning.