Last London Update

I've been dragging out the whole spring break in London story long enough. I haven't had a lot of time to blog lately between the pack-out for our upcoming move and more travel, thus I've fallen behind on my storytelling. I'll share with you just a few last highlights of our trip and then I'll move on to a new topic... I PROMISE!

Okay, so we'd gotten the news that we weren't flying out of London anytime soon due to the ash cloud situation, and we quickly determined our extended stay was going to cost us a pretty penny, thus we started taking in freebie attractions.

We went to the British Museum, which is actually a very cool place to visit.


Here is the Rosetta Stone, an Ancient Egyptian artifact instrumental in advancing the understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.


We listened to the history of selected artifacts with these audio guides.


These are ancient remains of a human body, which the boys found fascinating.


M was all about the museum, which totally surprised us. We didn't expect him to be very interested at all, but clearly we were wrong. He plopped right down in front of this sculpture and listened intently to the information on the audio guide.


This is part of a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures that were originally part of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. Impressed? We were.


This is a marble statue of a naked Aphrodite (Venus) crouching at her bath.


The next day we decided to walk to the science museum, and enjoyed a stroll through Hyde Park on the way there.


I hadn't expected to see so much wide-open untouched land in the city. It was beautiful!


We walked over the Serpentine, a recreational lake in Hyde Park.


All of my boys, my hubby included, found the science museum fairly interesting. I was less enthusiastic as science is just not my thing, however, I had a good time watching them and snapping photos.


Poor M couldn't keep his shoes tied. If he tied them once, he tied them a thousand times.


M enjoyed looking at the antique car.


Admittedly, I did find this interesting. The boys? Not so much.


What up?


This was a cool discovery in the health and medical field section, as it mentions Bethesda (located in the DC area, and someplace we've been several times) as being "the largest laboratory site devoted to biomedical research in the world."


M had fun in the hands-on section of the museum.


D looked like he was enjoying himself too.


My hubby was intent on trying to figure out this building block challenge.


From the look on his face, I think it's evident he wasn't successful.


After our science museum visit, we walked around a bit and decided to go inside Primark, a huge department store. The place was packed! It was as if we were in Kmart during the greatest blue light special ever.


I couldn't believe how crowded it was. It wasn't a major holiday or anything. I decided to snap a few photos of the crowd. The next thing I knew, some security guy approached us and asked me to stop photographing the store. I guess he thought I was casing the joint. He didn't understand that the country bumpkin in me was just gawking. I put the camera away.

On the way back to our hotel, we noticed police tape roping off a section on the corner, and there was blood splattered all over the sidewalk. We never did get the full scoop on what happened. Made for some excitement though.

You already know that we were unable to fly home to Spain from London. The ash cloud was wreaking havoc and we were continuing to spend money we hadn't planned on spending, thus we made a command decision to leave London and head south by train to Portsmouth, England, where we would eventually leave the country by ferry and end up in Bilbao, Spain. We would then catch a flight out of Bilbao to Jerez, which is close to our home.

Here's the route we took to get back to Spain.


This was our room on the ferry, which was much nicer than we'd anticipated. We thought it was going to be a tiny ferry, but it was quite large (1600 passengers) and was more like a mini cruise ship.


This is the main deck where the information desk was located. The ship had a couple of movie theaters, restaurants, a small casino, etc. It wasn't too shabby!


Dinner portions were out of control! I didn't just have some chicken... I had A chicken and probably 2 whole potatoes' worth of fries for one meal. Needless to say, I couldn't eat it all.


I enjoyed being outside on the observation deck, as that was where I felt the least amount of motion. I never got sick and didn't have to resort to motion sickness meds, but that's because I found my happy place here.


Some people got really relaxed and comfortable.


We got relaxed and comfortable too, only we didn't have swimsuits.


There was even a helipad for emergency helicopters to land, which is rather comforting to a first-time cruiser.

All in all, we had a fantastic time in London, but we were glad to get home. The volcano eruption and subsequent ash cloud situation made for great blog fodder though, I must say. This was a vacation we'll never forget for many reasons. Thanks for being patient with my seemingly never-ending saga. As promised, my next post will most definitely have a topic that doesn't involve London.