It Begins..

Hi All,

Sorry it took a couple of days to get the first post out, but with getting over jet lag, trying to cram London into 3 days and passing out from exhaustion, we really didn't have the time or inclination to sit down and do this until now.

Ok so we kicked off the trip in style, champagne at Sydney airport while waiting to board the plane:

After what was an extremely excruciating length of time in the hollow flying tube, we popped out the other side in the land of fish fingers and warm beer.

We grabbed a cab straight to the Mercure Kensington and the staff there kindly made us a much needed coffee (and threw in some croissants for the hell of it - my kind of people) while we waited for someone else to check out before they could arrange a shower for us to freshen up with until our room was ready. Yep it was a bloody long morning, but they made it as good as it could be.

We had to wait quite a while for a room to be ready so we decided to go find some breakfast. I think this May have been the 3rd breakfast we ate, but our bodies had no idea what was going on at that point so we just went with what we felt like.

We now have our favourite little breakfast joint in Kensington off Earl's Court Road called Gusto. It doesn't look like much, but they bake everything on premise, the coffee was drinkable, the food was great and the staff were very friendly. Also it was pretty affordable.

We felt like experienced locals about 5 mins after arriving in Kensington, shortly after we discovered where the Earls Court underground station was. As we were walking along about a block down from the underground, a lost french girl asked where the train was in very broken English. I happily gave her directions in equally broken French feeling very chuffed that I already knew something someone else didn't about where we were, and that I was able to deliver it somewhat coherently in French. Yay.

We returned back to our hotel and fortunately someone had checked out so we could now go and freshen up.

Once properly showered and according to the guy at the desk "looking completely different" (by that I interpreted that I no longer looked like hell, Nicky of course looked amazing already), we set off to explore the city. The locals may have interpreted this as the start of a zombie uprising from the look of us shuffling along with the vacant expressions and dead eyes of the travel-weary, strangely coupled with excitement and wonder.

We took the hop on/off bus operated by Golden Tours on the "blue route" which was a great way to see all the sites of the city to decide where you want to explore. We had zero energy so we were content to let the bus take us all over so we could work out where we wanted to go the next day.

We ticked off a couple of boxes though, we made sure to have fish and chips in a proper English pub (the Kings Arms) and I grabbed a very nice red ale too. It was all delicious.

We also went for a nice long walk through Hyde Park where we both were excited to see our first squirrel! We stalked that poor little bastard for about 25 mins before leaving him along only to discover that the whole park is crawling with them and we couldn't have looked more like tourists unless I was wearing a Union Jack cap. It was really awesome though and I want a pet squirrel now.

We decided on visiting the Tower of London on day 2 which took far longer than either of us anticipated but was well worth spending the extra time.

We learned a lot about the history of the Tower which neither of us knew about and were regaled with loads of humorous stories by the Yeoman Warder "Billy BeefEater" as he called himself, referring to the nickname for the Yeoman in the Tower.

This may have been when he was telling the children to look under their beds for the man trying to kill them..

We filled in the rest of the late afternoon by getting on the London Eye which I have to admit was not as interesting as I expected, you didn't get as great a view of the more iconic buildings as I would have liked. It was still good, but not great.

Pretty much the best thing to look at from the Eye.

After that we went and watched 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' at the Royal Theatre in the West End. That was very cool, here's us having another champagne before the show:

If the show comes to Sydney or Melbourne, it's really worth seeing, we both thought it was awesome.

I know this post is really long so I'll speed up to the last couple of things we've done today. Firstly, we went to the Natural History Museum, here's some not amazing shots of the building which was so huge I had to snap it in pieces:

Among many things they had a great dinosaur exhibit there which we spent a lot of time looking at. The whole thing was completely free unless you wanted to opt for an audio guide which cost 9 pound for the both of us.

After that it was back to the hotel for a quick change, and then off to the Ritz for High Tea. That place was amazing and I've told Nicky I ant all my lunches to now involve small sandwiches with the crusts cut off and a small bottle of champagne. I received a suitable response to that.

Here's us having cocktails in the Rivoli bar:

And of course more champagne once we got to the Palm Room..

Here's what the room looks like..

All in all it was a very swanky afternoon. And that's it so far, we're now getting ready for a very early start to meet up with the trafalgar group tomorrow morning so we can kick off our tour.

We will be sleeping in Paris tomorrow night, woohoo!

Catch you all soon.

Brandon.