I always forget how exhausted I am after an international flight. It's pretty hard to keep going for the rest of the day. I'm also not very experienced in crossing the Atlantic (I've done the Pacific >20 times, but the Alantic only about 6 or 7 times). I forget how EXHAUSTED I am in the morning of that first night. It is Tuesday morning and I'm reporting about our first day in London - which as Monday, 9/29.
I arrived at about 11:30 am. It took about an hour to get through the aiport and customs and then over to the rental car center. I arrived ahead of the rest of the team, so I went ahead and picked up my rental car, which worked out great. They gave me a Vauxhall Insignia, a brand I've never heard of before, but learned it is an off-shoot of VW. I made my way over to terminal 5, where they came in at about 1pm. I picked them up and we headed straight for the Hyde Park Hilton - our typical downtown London airport.
First, after checking in and taking 15 minutes to clean ourselves up a bit, we took a stroll over to Picadilly Circus and enjoyed some great Indian vegetarian cuisine. It was actually quite good! The Raiders and the Dolphins had played an NFL game the day before, so Regent street was decorated with USA flags and NFL banners. It was pretty cool!
After the late lunch (it was about 3:30pm when we finished), we headed over to Trafalga Square and really enjoyed the National Gallerie musuem - excellent artwork and it was nice to just walk around and enjoy the beauty. I really enjoyed seeing the Monet, the Renoir, the Rembrant and the excellent artwork that I hadn't seen before. I will say that the horse painting as well as the incredible painting of the river scene with buildings on either side were pretty inspiring. It was a very cool experience!
Trafalga square has some great street performers. They were "elevated" and dressed up like funny characters. It was pretty fun to watch!
Very cool painting - the perspective changed drastically as you walked by the painting.
This Van Gogh piece was probably the most popular in the building. Many people were posing in front of the painting - it is a nice piece. They had about 4-5 Van Gogh paintings.
The colors in these paintings were incredible. I really enjoyed the artistic quality of these works.
After the musuem, we took a nice stroll up to Buckingham Palace. We walked through St James park - I don't think I had walked through that park before - it was AWESOME. Very beautiful little river and the weather was near perfect!
Buckingham Palace was as I remembered it - a bit anti-climactic. We did get to see the guards march a bit, which was cool. After visiting this place, we decided to walk over to see parliament and Big Ben. Yep - we did a fair bit of walking on this first day, but it was awesome.
This night shot of Westminster Abby turned out really good. One day, I want to go inside and check this place out!
Big Ben at night didn't turn out so good on my iPhone camera, but it was spectacular to see at night. Again - the temperature and weather was near perfect!
The London Eye at night came out pretty well. I do admit that the eye was pretty cool at night as well.
After visiting this part of London, we hopped onto the tube and headed down to our favorite little Italian restaurant. It's a pretty good ways away, about 30 min via train, but the food and experience was worth the time investment. I had lobster linguine and sea bass - it tasted AWESOME! For dessert (pictured below) I had the chocolate mousse and I really loved that as well.
We got home at about 10:30pm, but I ended up working until past midnight. When my alarm rang this morning at 5:30am, I couldn't get up - I just stayed in bed as late as possible. I hope I start to feel better - I'm exhausted!
I will add a brief plug here at the end - I miss my family so much. It has been great to not have to travel for nearly 2 months. I was really re-connecting with the family and we were starting to get into a great routine. Unfortunately, I expect that I'm going to have to do a bunch of traveling in the last quarter of this year. It needs to be done though - I need to keep pushing this organization to drive to a common flow and methodology.
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