Hello from London!!!!

For those of you who weren't aware, Craig and I are in London right now. I have a meeting on Tuesday, so we decided that he would come with me a few days early and we could sightsee before we leave on Wednesday (my birthday!!). I'm going to try and post a day-to-day account of what we did each day, but my dumb ass forgot the cord to my camera to download pics to the computer, so I'll have to add those when we get back.

I'll start with our flight (and yes, these LON posts will be detailed so they may be quite long). We left CLE at 6.25pm ET and there were a couple of my co-workers on our flight. One cool perk is that one of my colleagues was able to get the three of us into the President's Club at Hopkins while we were waiting to board our flight. It was my first time in the President's Club...I felt rich!! :) Anyhoo, our 7.5 hour flight to LON was probably the best flight I've ever had, not many bumps at all, on time, smooth the whole way. I am definitely feeling the time zone difference though...we flew east during the day, watched it get dark, and then at 1am ET watched the sun start to rise in the UK. Needless to say, 1) I didn't get any sleep on the flight (never do), and 2) I was WIDE awake at 2am ET. Hell, they served us breakfast on the plane at 12:30am ET!!!

Anyhoo, by the time we landed, went thru customs, got our luggage, found a cab to take us to our hotel and check in, it was close to 4am ET. I was BEAT. Craig was ok since he slept a couple of hours on the plane, but I was up close to 24 hours straight. And those who know me know that I need at least 8-10 hours of sleep a day to be a civil human being. :)

Craig's friend Paul works for Embassy Suites, and he got us a hotel room (a Hilton) about 30 mins from downtown LON for $75 USD a night. AWESOME!!! Our first room had issues though: both the toilet and A/C didn't work, the sink faucet leaked when you turned it on, and the room looked like it needed some TLC. So they moved us to another room and this one is SO much better. I crashed for about 4 hours before we started getting ready to check out downtown.

So remember how I just said that we were 30 mins from downtown LON? Our plan was to take buses and trains around the city to save some $$ (and everything here is so expensive). The train station that we went to to get downtown was closed, so we were pretty much lost in our city after that. We knew where we were and how to get back to the hotel, but that was it. And keep in mind that it's now 6pm UK time / 1pm ET and we hadn't eaten anything all day (and when I don't eat for long periods of time my blood sugar drops and I get super cranky). So we found a McDonald's and ate there. Yes, our first meal in London was McDonald's. And then we were aggravated by this point so we hit up a convenience store to stock up on beverages and munchies to stash in our room (side note: why is it that whenever I travel outside of Cleveland, no one carries Pepsi products???? It's all Coke!!!! Yes, I do have a Diet Pepsi addiction and it's not pretty when there's none around). Anyway, we took the bus back to our hotel room and now here we are.

So our plan for the rest of the night is to just chill out and figure out how to get to downtown tomorrow so we can go on our tours. And go to the hotel bar. Tomorrow I got us tickets for 2 tours: one is an all-around tour (link here: http://www.theoriginaltour.com/) and one is a Jack the Ripper tour (http://www.premiumtours.co.uk/tours/details.asp?iProductID=124&gclid=CKuZzLHm4JQCFQ9oQgodPy2XQQ), so we're really excited about doing those. After the tours I think we're going to hang around downtown to grab a bite to eat and explore the city at night.

That's it for today's installment...check back tomorrow night as I hope to have our recap of the tours and downtown up and posted by 10pm UK time / 5pm ET. Take care!!!

Cheerio!
Roxanne and Craig

P.S. Have to give a shout out to my mom and Rachel for taking care of Milo and Otis for us while we're gone. While we miss our doggies dearly, we feel good knowing that they're in safe hands. Thanks guys!!!