England, Scotland, Ireland - Day 1

This years vacation ROCKED!!! I know I say that every year, but that just because we ROCK at vacations :) We have dubbed this vacation "SO CLOSE"...

We started out by flying into London, England. We had a flight that left Atlanta around 6pm and landed in London - Gatwick at 8am London time. Once we landed and thank goodness we did (the flight was incredibly bumpy), we stood in line at customs so long that they put our luggage in the "special" area. We found our luggage and made our way to our train. Little did we know that different trains (and different train companies) would use the same train track. So two stops down the line, we got off the train we were on and got on the next one. So did everyone else :) Aha! Now we are on the right train, going to London-Victoria station. We arrive at London-Victoria station where we had to buy new tickets for the Underground (subway system). We lug our luggage to the District Line where we get on the right train... sorta... the train we were on split and went south when we needed to go north. So two more train switches and we finally arrive at our stop. Our stop, West Kensington, was said to be a 5 min walk to our hotel. We soon learn that a 5 min walk in London is like "just down the road" in Atlanta... 15 - 20 mins carrying luggage. We arrived at our hotel at 2:45pm. We landed at 8am. We get checked-in to our hotel, refresh ourselves a little, and head back out... after all we are on Vacation... and we have stuff to see!!! We stopped at a Tesco (thanks Barbara for the tip!) to pick up some sandwiches, etc and headed to Buckingham Palace.



We really have no idea of the importance of any of the places we saw around Buckingham Palace, but it seemed to be a place for people to congregate :)





Compared to the 80 degree weather in Atlanta, low-50's was freezing!









We also headed over to see Big Ben and St. ?'s ... lot's of walking for the first day.














It wasn't very late by the time we arrived back at our hotel. However, the Jet Lag (or lack of ability to sleep on the plane for fear of crash landing) finally caught up with us. We went to bed around 7pm london time thinking we would just take a nap. We woke up the next morning :)

Eeeeee