A Horrible Day Gets Better

Today started our horribly.  We woke up a little later than we wanted to this morning so that we could beat traffic on the road.  Seriously, DO NOT DRIVE IN THE UK!!!  It is scary and some of the roads are so narrow that you pray with all your strength that you will make it through.  Tim wasn't sure where to take the car back so we got on the motor way (freeway) and took off with a generic Hertz address.  BIG MISTAKE!  More on the bad part in a second, first let me tell you about British rest stops.  They are amazing!  The one we stopped at had a KFC, Starbucks, huge bathrooms and a drug store.  They were clean and wonderful.  We got coffee and a pastry each for under ten pounds, our cheapest meal so far, and went on our way.  Things started getting a little fishy when we started heading towards downtown London.  We got our car at the airport which is out of town a ways so this was not right.  We spent about an hour driving lost around BUSY streets where I was crying and Tim, bless him, was staying calm and cool.  We finally found a different Hertz where the employee proceeded to drop our brand new GPS.  She put the right address in and we were on our way with only three times getting lost.  I think it's fair to say that Tim and I will be having nightmares of our GPS saying "recalculating route".  Finally we made it to our destination and we gladly said good bye to the car.

Now that we had returned our car Tim called our private car that was supposed to take us to our hotel, the Grovsner.  When we called at 12:30 they said our pick up time was 4. We didn't feel like staying in the car rental agency until then so they sent a car that got to us around 1.  God bless our driver because when we headed back into downtown London we found out that they were have a test trial bicycle ride for the Olympics.  They pretty much shut down every road.  We drove in hellish traffic with this poor man for about 1.5 to 2 hours.  It was chaos!  After having been on the road since the morning we were tired, hungry and just crabby.  We did see Big Ben, The National Museum, Piccadilly Circus, London Eye, and some really cool buildings on the drive.  When we arrived at our hotel you couldn't even see the front as the entire thing is under construction, which we knew in advance, but caused us to wonder where we were.

Once we entered the hotel they promptly informed us that they did not have our reservation.  The computer system was down and they had supposedly gotten a master list of everyones reservation.  Thankfully they had a room available even though they didn't have our reservation.  We got up to our room and of course our converter didn't work in their sockets.  Tim called the desk and they loaned us one which is how your getting this post.  I then proceeded to cry for an hour and fall asleep while Tim worked through the hundred things that weren't going right.  He paid for our internet and it stopped working so he had to call about five different people to get it working.  Than we didn't have power because they didn't tell us that we needed to insert a room key into a slot to activate it.  We decided to just stay in and paid about 40 pounds which in dollars is more than 40 dollars to share a chicken leg on mashed sweet potatoes with a small piece of cake and two diet cokes.  It was 5:30 by then so we scarfed it seeing as how we hadn't eaten since ten that morning and only a very small breakfast.  Then feeling better we decided to head out on the town.

We walked the one to two mile stretch to Piccadilly Circus.  This is supposed to be comparable to Times Square.  A lot of the big billboards were under scaffold and it was light so not so impressive.  We noticed Ripley's Believe it or Not and decided to go in.  It was a lot of fun seeing the different things like Henry VIII's shoe.  I loved the British history that was in there.  When we got out it was beautiful with the lit up billboards and signs.  We walked back to the hotel but feeling hungry from our very small dinner we went into Victoria Station to get some food.  Victoria Station is AMAZING!  They have everything in there and it was so busy and neat.  Our hotel actually has a door right into the station that is unlocked during the day.  We got some good old American McDonald's and walked back to the hotel.  On our way a guy walked buy yelling about giving money to the poor.  He was a loan rioter I would say.  It was enough for us to decide not to walk at night by ourselves anymore.  Until that time we had felt safer here than we did back home.

We were hoping to download more pictures today but the internet here is weird and will not allow to download photos. Tomorrow we have a taxi picking us up to go to see the wax figures.  We are also planning on seeing Buckingham Palace, Harrods, and a few other places.  We hope to have a much better day.  Hope you all are enjoying the blog, write to you tomorrow!