England - Day 4 - Lumbering Into London

Windsor Castle - The Brits claim this is the largest castle in the world! I believe them too, after seeing it!

Our last morning in the English countryside started off with a delicious breakfast made for us by Brenda, our cute little B&B owner. She lived in THE cutest little cottage, and her breakfast was my favorite meal of our entire trip. 

A full English breakfast! It kept us full for HOURS, which we were grateful for.

Brenda's house. Isn't it the cutest???

Brenda's front yard. It was BEAUTIFUL.

Our last picture in the Cotswolds. We took this just down the street from Brenda's house.

We were sad to say goodbye to the Cotswolds. They were the most darling little towns I think I've ever seen. Maybe that I ever WILL see. I'm not quite sure how anything can compare. But - we were also anxious to get on to London!! As amazing as the countryside was, we were SO excited to be on our way to London. There was SO much that we were looking forward to seeing there.

Before we drove into London though, we took a little side trip into Oxford. There is a school there called Christ Church College, and that is the main reason we wanted to stop in Oxford. William Penn, John Wesley, and Lewis Carroll went to school here, but although that is pretty awesome, our main reason for wanting to go was to see where they filmed some scenes from Harry Potter. They have a staircase that many scenes are filmed on, and the Great Hall from the movies was modeled after the Dining Hall of Christ Church College. Well, we got lost getting to Oxford, so we were already feeling a little annoyed that we had wasted that time. And when we got to Christ Church College, we found out that the Great Hall was under construction and we couldn't even see it. LAME! It was SUPER expensive to go in just to see the staircase, so we didn't go. I wish now that we would have, but we just couldn't justify paying that much money just to look at the staircase. The outside of the school was still super pretty and majestic, so we stuck around long enough to get a few pictures of it.

Pretty impressive, huh??

We wanted to eat lunch at The Eagle and Child - a cozy little pub that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would frequent, but when we got there it was closed. Another bummer from Oxford. And then it started POURING rain. We took a few more pictures in Oxford on the way back to our car, but we decided we had had enough of Oxford, and decided to make our way to London.

I really should have been making a frowny face since this place was closed, but I really was excited to at least see it, so I guess that is good enough.

It was fun to see the cute little school boys outside playing. It made me feel like I wasn't a tourist for a second - like I was just experiencing the culture.

Okay, seriously!? I LOVE board games, and this place was a board game CAFE! You could go get lunch and play a board game while you were at it. There was a giant bookshelf with HUNDREDS of board games to choose from. If we had more time, I would definitely have stopped to play a game over lunch.

We had one more stop to make before turning in the car and heading into London - and that was Windsor Palace. Windsor is essentially the "vacation home" or "2nd residence" of the royal family. It's just a few miles outside of London, and has been home to the royal family for 900 years. It is the largest and oldest occupied castle in the world. Windsor Castle is much more than just a castle though - it is more like a little city! It is ENORMOUS. Seeing Windsor was the closest we actually felt to royalty in England. The only bummer was that it was POURING BUCKETS of rain while we were there - which we were prepared for, but after awhile, it sure got annoying. We weren't allowed to take any pictures inside the castle, which was too bad because it was BEAUTIFUL. 

 Luckily, after we finished the tour and came outside, the rain clouds had disappeared and it was SUNNY! It was still cold, but we were so grateful that the rain had stopped that we hardly even noticed.

This castle was so awesome. It was just so fancy! And so fun to learn about all of the history of the kings and queens of England who had lived there. I felt so cultured by the time we were finished. 

Thank you sun!!

In one of the courtyards of Windsor is St. George's Chapel. The current queen Elizabeth's parents are buried here - we got to see their graves. That was cool! 

At the end of our tour was where we got the best shot of the guards - SO iconic of London. They were at Buckingham Palace too, but we could get much closer here. Dave is doing his best impression of the guard.

After Windsor, we were FINALLY ready to turn the car in, and head into the city! Dave was beyond thrilled to be turning in the car. He really did a fantastic job of driving, but it was stressful and scary. We were both ready to be done!

Dave on his last stretch - from Windsor to the airport!

After we turned the car in and figured out how to get into the city, it was getting kind of late in the evening. We figured that all we had time to do was drop our stuff off at the hotel, grab some dinner, and then see a few of the sights at night. We rode the tube from Heathrow Airport to our hotel, and to say it was a change of pace from the countryside would be a gross understatement. London was all hustle, bustle, busy, crazy, fast, loud, and impatient - a COMPLETELY different mentality than we had been used to in the countryside.

Our hotel in London was pretty bad. Everything in London is expensive - twice as expensive as the countryside. Dave was a little panicked about paying to stay 4 nights in London, so he looked for a low-cost hotel. And a low-cost hotel he found, but let me tell you what - you get what you pay for. I'm not sure that Dave will ever be entrusted with picking out the hotels again after our experience in London. We stayed at the Easy Hotel, which is a cheap hotel chain that is basically a hostel with privacy. Our bed took up 9/10ths of the space in the room and the bathroom door took up the other 1/10th. So - if the bathroom door was open, there was about a 1 foot by 1 foot area that you could walk in. Our bed literally was up against three of the walls of the room. My head and my feet touched both walls every night. We had our suitcases too which took up what little floor space there was left. We had to take turns getting ready, since there wasn't enough room for both of us to get dressed at the same time. One person had the 1 foot by 1 foot area, while the other person was in the shower. And you couldn't turn the shower on all the way, because the shower took up the entire bathroom - including the toilet. We couldn't go to the bathroom if the other person was in the shower because we would literally be in the shower stream. Everything besides a bath towel cost extra money - housekeeping, an extra pillow, a hair dryer, channels on the TV, even a hand towel. And, as you probably guessed, we didn't want to pay the extra money for any of the "frills" like, you know, a clean towel. There was no ventilation in the room and so nothing that got wet dried - ever. Our towels were still wet every morning. Needless to say, I felt a TINY BIT claustrophobic being in that room. It's a dang good thing that we were crazy sight-seers and didn't spend hardly any time in the room. I might have gone crazy otherwise.

See Dave's feet? That was the area we had to change in. I was standing IN THE HALLWAY to take this picture, because I couldn't fit in the room to take the picture. And you can see where my head and feet would touch both walls each night. 

The EasyHotel did nothing to lessen my stress of the change of scene from the countryside, and neither did our dinner that night. We decided to try eating in a pub that Dave had researched ahead of time that was close to our hotel. We got there, and there were SO many people crammed into the pub and hardly anywhere to sit. We finally found a tiny little table that was only really the size for drinks, and we had no idea what we were doing. We didn't know if someone came to take our order, or if we ordered at the bar, or what was going on. We tried to look around and see what everyone else was doing, and it seemed like they were ordering at the bar. So Dave went up to order for us, and I sat back to try and decompress. Haha. It sounds so silly now as I'm typing this that I was worked up about it all, but it was really such a dramatic change that I had a hard time adjusting. We got our food finally, and it wasn't even that good - it was really expensive, and not that great. That's sort of how everything in England is though, so not too surprising there. Once we ate our food, got out of that stuffy, loud pub, and into the relatively quieter street with fresh air, I felt my stress melting away. We hopped onto a double decker bus to drive past the big sights - Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye, and Trafalgar Square. We had decided that we would take a night time Rick Steves' Walking Tour through the old City of London, to learn more about its history. When I saw Big Ben, I was so excited that I forgot about my stress and started to soak in London. We both wanted to just sit and take it all in, so we didn't get any pictures - we just enjoyed the view. That was nice.

Dave ordering our dinner at the crazy pub.

Our nighttime walking tour started just beyond Trafalgar Square, and walked us through some of the big sites of the old City of London. London is more than 600 square miles and is divided into different neighborhoods. We toured the "City of London", which is a one square mile area surrounding St. Paul's Cathedral and is the former walled city of Shakespeare's day. When the Romans occupied London, they called it Londinium. It is now the modern financial district, and is simply called, "The City".  Before this, I had no idea that there was any distinction between London and the City of London. The things you learn from Rick Steves! (Don't tell Dave I said that! Haha.) There was a major fire in 1666 that burned down essentially the entire City of London. In the aftermath, architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to help rebuild the city. He designed 23 different churches, the most notable one being St. Paul's. We got to walk through the city and see the different churches that he designed, all culminating at St. Paul's. It was pretty awesome.

The Royal Courts of Justice, with a nice double decker bus action shot. :)

Dr. Johnson's House was one of the stops on the tour. It was closed by the time we got there, but we could still see the outside. He is famous in England for inventing the modern day dictionary. He would get together with friends and colleagues, and write down words they thought were great and compiled them in a big book. He is also famous for the quote, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." If you asked me how I felt about London a few hours earlier, I would have told you I must have been tired of life. Haha. I felt differently by the time we saw this sign. :D 

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. We had already eaten dinner, but this was a fun stop to peek in through the windows. This is a restaurant where Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Dr. Johnson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were frequent guests. It was so fun to see places like this all throughout England and imagine some of my favorite authors sitting in the places I was looking at. It was kind of surreal.

St. Paul's at night. So pretty!

We ended our walking tour with a walk across the Millennium Bridge. I was dying to walk across the bridge, since it is shown in Harry Potter. Haha. We are Harry Potter nerds for sure. Since it was at nighttime, all the other bridges were lit up, and it was so fun to see all the lights shining on the River Thames. I loved the view of Tower Bridge that we could see.

I loved learning about the City of London, and all of the history behind it. I loved sinking my teeth into the British culture, and learning about their past. I loved feeling like I was part of the big city. We stopped to buy a few groceries for us to eat for breakfast the next morning, and then hit the hay at our lovely EasyHotel. Our first night in London was a little stressful (at least for me), but ended up being wonderful.