Soul Crushing Breakup vs. Permanent Marriage Til You Die

Dublin Day 2

We set off on our first morning in Dublin, sleep-deprived, and sick. Our day only had one event on the calendar: a tour of the Guinness Brewery. We set off to St. Stephen’s Green and the downtown area to take in the same sights we had seen the night before with some added daylight. The Green’s scenery appealed to us as a place to just rest in the sunlight, hoping maybe some sunbeams would kill off the flu-like germs that had infested our immune systems.

We mustered up the energy to walk around the neighborhood and found a mall that sold kitschy wool products, with Celtic symbols stitched on the sides. It was then that we realized we had neglected to get our families any souvenirs from our trip, and with 48 hours left abroad, we’d better start looking for tat. But we were unsuccessful in the wool shop.

The day seemed daunting, and the city felt small. At least, it did to me. We walked 30 minutes across the entire city to the Guinness Brewery for the last tour of the day. The Brewery is in a corner of the city, but its building looms so large over its neighbors that it feels like its own world built of brick and cobblestone.

I was surprised at how poor the security for the tour was. For having booked our tickets months in advance, we were able to walk into the basement of the building with printed tickets in hand, straight into the gift shop and begin our tour.

The tour begins with the ingredients of Guinness and how they are harvested and processed. Winding up a series of ramps and staircases, the tour walked us through the history of Guinness’s founder, Arthur Guinness, and his relationship with the City of Dublin. On the upper levels of the building are a few cafes, restaurants, and the tap house where tourists could learn how to pour a perfect pint of Guinness. I did it, and have the certificate to prove it!

The tour ends on the top level of the building which is made of glass and holds a bar. It sucked. By the time we finished the tour, it was around 7 pm and the bar was packed. We stood shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sipping our stouts, angling for a view of the city. It shouldn’t have been as hard as it was– the bar was made of glass. Yet I couldn’t see beyond the end of my nose because of how busy the bar was.

‘

So sick, full on 3/4 of a glass of beer, we set out into the dark Dublin night in search of food and cough medicine. We found both on the same block near our hotel. First stop: the pharmacy. We walked in, and I tugged on Kenny’s sleeve to point out the sign that very well could have led to our trip’s demise: Cold and flu products would only be sold to individuals over 25 years old. At 23 years old, this was bad news for us. So we settled for the less potent medicine that would help us sleep at night.

We found a pizza place where the business model was likely based on that of a nightclub or Abercrombie shop. The tables around us were stocked with youths who looked like they were hitting the town. Us, in our sweatshirts with our runny noses, were purely looking for sustenance, which proved difficult in the pizza place/nightclub/Abercrombie. We tried to flag down service for too long before someone took our drink and pizza order. But this crime was easily forgiven once we had the most delicious pizza we’d ever had delivered to our table.

After a few drinks and pizza, we returned back to the worst hotel I’ve ever been in for another restless night of sleep.

Dublin Day 1

Our introduction to Dublin was an interesting one. We received an informal but welcome tour of the city by Ronan, our cab driver, who revealed he’s lived by the Dubin airport for 53 years.

Our Dublin hotel was probably one of the worst hotel experiences I’ve ever had, and I don’t quite know where to begin. So I’ll lay out what happened chronologically.

• Arrived around 8:30 pm, and the door to the hotel was locked. Not the door to our hotel room, the door to the hotel. Ronan the Cabbie had to bang on the hotel door for us to get the receptionist to let us in.
• Timoty (yes, spelled that way) was very frazzled when I gave him my name to check in. He asked if another member of our party had already checked into the room, and I told him that was impossible because the only people who were supposed to be in the room were standing in front of him.
• Timoty revealed to us that another person had been given our room accidentally, so we would be given his room. No big deal, as long as we have a place to sleep.
• The room was suite-like, with an exit onto the top floor balcony. Which was great. Until we learned that the door that leads from the balcony to our room DOES NOT LOCK. The top floor balcony is shared among all sixth-floor residents so anyone on the sixth floor could walk into our room.
• Exiting the room for dinner, we came across Timoty who was struggling under the weight of delivering a new mattress to the room next door. We didn’t stop to get the full story, but it struck me as enough of an oddity that I’m sharing it with you.
• At 8 am the next morning, I woke up incredibly paranoid that someone was in our room. I got out of bed to look around the room, only to find that the balcony door was wide open. Cold Dublin air and strong winds were gusting into our room before I shut the door. (No one was in the room, but it was the sound of the door banging against its frame that had startled me.)
• At 9 am that same morning, the fire alarm went off on the floor for a brief 10 seconds. It was enough time for me to shoot out of bed, grab my phone, and prepare my shoes. I popped my head out of the doorway where the housekeeper shrugged her shoulders at me and said: “I dunno what that was, it wasn’t me.” So I returned to bed.
• Between 10 and 11 am, a mysterious door somewhere near our room kept opening and slamming shut. The slamming was so abrasive that it shook the headboard of our bed repeatedly. I have a few theories as to what this door was. Perhaps it was a neighboring hotel guests’ unruly balcony door in the wind. Or more likely it was the housekeeper’s supply room door opening and closing as she accessed the supplies.

Somewhere during my personal hell outlined above, we set out to find a late dinner at a pub Ronan the Cabbie recommended. We walked past St. Stephen’s Green and the street Christmas decorations, and we were impressed. The city had an interesting feel to it at night. Homeless men gathered around a folding table that was dispensing hot drinks and food. There were different street musicians playing. Someone played the bagpipes, and a few talented guitarists were out.

The pub Ronan recommended was strange. With a smoking section on the top floor, and a serve-yourself-cafeteria-style dinner. We left in favor of a loud pub and ordered food as the kitchens were closing. It was a good inauguration to the city for two people coming down with tremendous head colds.

We passed out shortly in the room for the most restless night ever.

London Day 7

Alas, we reached the conclusion of our first week abroad. It felt overdue, as evidenced by the nasty cold symptoms Kenny woke up with. Already, one day of touring and a 9 pm flight to Dublin looked like they were going to be a stretch.

We took our time to get ready and pack up our belongings, careful to check the safe three times before dropping our bags off with the front desk and checking out.

We went to the Science Museum in London, a free museum, and it seemed like the entirety of the city had the same idea. Between the Science Museum and the British Museum, the lines were ridiculous. We navigated through the exhibits without much concern for what we were reading. I was too stressed about making our international flight, still unclear if Ireland was in the U.K. (I know, I know) and Kenny, having fallen ill, was at a feverish point where his brain had turned into soup. We eventually forsook the Museum in favor of finding Kenny a place to rest and me a place with free wifi where I could check us in for our flight to Dublin.

We navigated back to a pub in Pimlico, near to our hotel, and I ordered us food and stress-ate over making sure we had plane seats that were not ridiculously small for two Americans of average height– a struggle we faced on our flight to Heathrow. We then returned to the hotel collect our bags and bid a saddened farewell to the hotel staff who had become our family, if just for the holidays.

Now, let me sing you the song of our journey to Heathrow. Not unlike our journey from Heathrow to the hotel, our commute to the airport was stressful. Being an avid traveler, I usually like to show up to the airport sometime between yesterday and six hours before the flight is scheduled to depart. Alright, that’s an exaggeration, but my mom taught me that nothing is sweeter than the taste of edom to roam an airport, uninhibited by a sprint to the terminal. As Kenny was sick, I tried to order an Uber– but Uber decided that I, a Washingtonian, didn’t belong in London, and shut down my account promptly. I still don’t have clarity on why this happened, but there we were. We had already ruled out taking a cab, fearful that we would blow through the pound, euros, and dollars in our wallets if we wound up with the same type of oh-so-hospitable cabbie on our return that we had on our first day in the city. Kenny advocated– and won– for the Undergound. With minimal transfers, and 20 stops later, the trip was over an hour long. We uncomfortably stood with our duffel bags among rush hour commuters.

We arrived at Heathrow a comfortable 3 hours earlier than our scheduled flight, around 6:00 pm. A very kind Aer Lingus clerk checked us in for a flight that would take off one hour sooner, at 7 pm, giving us just enough time to spend our remaining pounds on Toblerone and bottles of water at the duty-free shop before boarding the flight for Dublin. We rested on the flight, simply exhausted, and landed safely in Ireland not too much longer.

Coming next week: the tale of our first night in Dubin. It’s a doozy, and deserved its own post!

London Day 6

Following a Boxing Day that can best be characterized as strenuous, I think London had begun to take its toll on me. Two days of downtime, from Christmas to Boxing Day, tempted me to move along. Even though I had so much left to cross off my list, the city felt… sleepy. I felt an unwelcome visitor in a not-too-foreign country, a byproduct of being too comfortable with my surroundings, yet not so comfortable that I was accepted by locals, as tested with my poorly-honed British accent. (Thanks, Anglophenia.)

That being said, we headed off to the Tower of London to diligently cross another item off of the bucket list. The weather was gloomy and rainy, which attracted us to the covered parts of the Tower. We spent maybe two hours at the Tower before the lines of tourists, poor weather, and our growling stomachs pulled us away to lunch. We left without seeing the Crown Jewels, an exhibit I remember from childhood as being incredibly impressive. The line for this exhibit was about two hours long, and as Kenny wryly pointed out, “We can just look up pictures online.”

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We found lunch at one of the pubs we had scouted during our Christmas Day walk along the Thames. The pub had televisions along the walls replaying coverage of Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry, and we found ourselves in a discussion about how unsustainable a monarchy should be in 2018, and wanting to shake the entire population of Great Britain by the shoulders to say “Don’t you watch The Crown? Your taxes pay for their lifestyles!” My disdain for a Constitutional monarchy, yes, spurred by a Netflix show, was lessened only slightly by this fact: 

A leading consultancy firm found that the Royals contributed £1.766 billion to the economy in 2017.

Maintaining the monarchy costs around £292 million – £4.50 per person.

I will say, if you are planning on traveling to London, the obsession with the Royal family in the media is ridiculous and inescapable. Although, as I’m writing this after the Royal wedding, I see that the American media is just as infatuated. 

After lunch, we walked to the HMS Belfast, a little buzzed due to a miscommunication over a ginger beer. The HMS Belfast was one of the Royal Navy’s most active Town-class light cruisers (read: battleships) that sits permanent display on the Thames. We navigated the tight ladders and corridors to look at the displays of the Belfast’s impressive 30-year tenure. If you’re claustrophobic, like I am, this probably isn’t the sight for you. If you’re a World War II buff, like me, this is definitely for you. The Belfast has so many floors and independent exhibits, we were there until the ship’s closing. 

We returned back to the hotel and prepared for our impending departure to Dublin the next night. 

London Day 5: Boxing Day

Ah, the much-anticipated arrival of Boxing Day. To those of you who are unfamiliar with the holiday, I counted myself among you until December 26, 2017. But thanks to the kindness of our hotel concierge, I now know that Boxing Day is the celebration of packing up gifts one receives on Christmas. Seriously. That’s what she told us.

In planning a trip over a major holiday, I offer a word of caution to future travelers. We budgeted for two holidays in our travel: Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Perhaps New Year’s Eve. But in all of my plotting and planning for months in advance of our departure, I never thought that Boxing Day could interrupt our plans.

So we set off for the Science Museum in London, only to find that we were going to be sorely disappointed. This is the second example of many why you shouldn’t trust Google Maps to do your bidding.

We walked around the neighborhood taking in the sights and murmuring expletives to ourselves. We were really relying on only having to serve as each others’ sole source of entertainment for two holidays. By the third consecutive holiday, the soundtrack to our aimless walk around the city was a chorus of “I know where I’m going” and “Just listen to me, dammit.”

We landed at Hyde Park yet again, which was possibly the best place we could have ended up. We walked around Kensington Gardens and accidentally found Kensington Palace. The weather was on our side, showing the sun for perhaps the second time in our vacation.

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We walked the length of the park and found ourselves back at the Winter Wonderland amusement park. As a roller coaster lover, it was a rude awakening to remember that Kenny doesn’t like roller coasters. After trying to convince him to get on a roller coaster (unsuccessfully) we compromised on a different ride and then sought out some mac n cheese. Again, this is the best festival I have been to in my life.

When we had tuckered ourselves out, we retired to the hotel to rest our feet. When I wasn’t looking, Kenny researched the nearest theaters to go see the newest Star Wars movie. We had seen people raving about it online, and the idea of waiting to get back to the States seemed untenable.  Kenny purchased tickets and we set off to find dinner at an Indian place nearby. But surprise! Boxing Day meant most of the places we had lined up as our first, second, and third choices for dinner were closed.

We landed at a pub and thus began my no-eyelash rule. Now, it wasn’t my rule originally. But looking at the menu of the 12th pub we visited since landing in the U.K. turned my stomach. I couldn’t eat any burgers, venison, or stew. So I willed myself to avoid pork and beef for the rest of the trip.

After dinner and the movie, we walked back to the hotel through a series of back roads in parts of Pimlico we had yet to explore.

 

London Day 4: Christmas

Christmas Day began with a lazy roll out of bed. After a phone call home,  we decided to walk around to explore parts of the city we had yet to see. Because of the holiday, the Underground wasn’t running, so our options were to walk or take a cab. Because of our poor experience with our cabbie on Day 1, we decided to walk to the London Bridge.

Our walk took us through Pimlico and Victoria, across the Thames, and through some neighborhoods that were designed around the color gray. Gray homes on gray streets with gray sidewalks, and I’m not entirely convinced it was the overcast weather creating the dark aura. We walked for an hour before needing food and searching for an open restaurant. We were limited in our options and settled on some kind of unreputable chicken hut where Kenny ordered a chicken sandwich and received a quarter pounder.

We made it to the Bridge and saw where the people we hadn’t seen on our walk had been hiding. The crowd was refreshing and helped return some life to the city on a holiday  relies on community. We walked the length of the Bridge, then explored the side streets along the Thames. We saw The Globe Theater and St. Paul’s Cathedral before walking an hour and a half back to the hotel.

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There’s an eeriness to being in a foreign city away from family on a major holiday. An unspoken sullenness hung in the air between us: we both missed our families and the meals we could be sharing with them that night. When dinnertime rolled around and we could roll ourselves out of our room, we couldn’t decide on what to eat for dinner. As we would come to find out in an hour, that wasn’t a decision that was necessarily ours to make. I don’t know if this is standard in all cities, but in London’s Pimlico neighborhood, restaurants compete for business with their Christmas Ever Prix Fix menus. We walked up and down the street, which was as far as our legs could carry us, comparing menus in windows, before we arrived back at The Windermere Brasserie, embarrassingly close to closing time, for a delicious Christmas dinner. We laughed with the Windermere staff as they toasted the holiday and closed up the restaurant.

London Day 3: Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve has arrived. Kenny and I celebrated Christmas Eve between Harrods and Hyde Park.

We set off in the morning to find an oft-advertised “Winter Wonderland.” We couldn’t find the Winter Wonderland on any map online but had heard it was near Harrods. I was eager to show Kenny Harrods. From my memory, Harrods was a place with delicious spicy ginger beer and a sundae bar. You read that right– a bar with endless sundae toppings.  We pushed past people on the sidewalk– mentally willing them to walk on the proper side of the street– a classic case of Americans being in a country that drives on the reverse sides of the road.

When we finally arrived at Harrods, we walked into the women’s accessories section and were bathed in $100 perfume and instant regret. The traffic in Harrods was just as dense as it was on the sidewalks outside and I was working off of a six-year-old memory to find the ginger beer. We aimlessly pushed through crowds in the purses, bracelets, cheeses, meats, chocolates, and coffee sections until we found the roomful of cafes. The lines for service were unlike anything we ever saw, so we made our way to the jewelry section of the store.

There comes a time for every woman when she realizes she is not, and never will be, a princess. In that moment she realizes that yellow diamonds and deep blue sapphires in ornate settings are not designed for her and will never grace her neck. That moment came for me, shockingly, in front of the Harry Winston store in the jewelry department of Harrods on Christmas Eve. I don’t know if you could conceptualize a more inappropriate time to feel as greedy as I did, but there was the feeling putting weights in my shoes. In a somber mood, I trudged up and through the rest of the department store. We perused the Rolexes, fur coats, and landed where we were happiest: in the candy and stuffed animals section. Kenny found a stuffed panda that was easily his size.

 

Kenny with the panda bear in Harrods.

 

I followed a vague memory from my earlier London trip to that aforementioned sundae bar. And for me, you may recall, ice cream remains a food group despite my lactose intolerance. So Kenny and I navigated our way through $20,000 home decor items and the tchotchke shop to find the ice cream. Once we arrived, I was very confident that I hadn’t been to this ice cream bar, and I must have misremembered, because there is no world in which my mom would have let us have a 5-scoop sundae at thirty British pounds. There was no world in which we were going to pay 45 U.S. dollars for ice cream. Our commitment to the mission was weak.

Hungry and getting hungrier, we forewent the ice cream and ventured out to a neighboring street to find any place that would be open for lunch. This is the first time but not the last I’ll say: Google Maps failed us. Our first choice for lunch was closed, and our second had been converted into a waxing salon, despite Google Maps encouraging us that it was a pub. We wandered around until we found an Italian restaurant and could rest up. We ordered “The American”– a pepperoni pizza– and regrouped.

When we finally set off again with garlic knots and pepperoni in our bellies, we decided to finally find the Winter Wonderland we had set out to find earlier in the morning.

The actual carnival at Hyde Park was fabulous. Spanning several acres across the park, the roller coasters and pretzel stands were staples to the park for two months out of each year. Luckily for us, the park was open on the holiday (and FREE) and we waited patiently to enter the park. We made a B-line for the Bavarian-themed portion of the festivities, where Kenny got a rum and Coke and I got a warm cinnamon pretzel the size of my face. We meandered around the park some more until dark when we walked all the way back to the Windermere. We collapsed back at the hotel, with only an hour before dinner began.

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***

We hung out at the hotel, switching between Judge Judy and Gogglebox (a fine British tv program that should definitely be picked up in the States.) We got a late dinner at a local pub that was surprisingly open on the holiday. We got late desserts and Nespresso at the Windermere in an attempt to stay awake for church and chatted with the hotel staff who served as our pseudo-guides for what to do and avoid in London.

 

My relationship with church can best be described as frigid, which is warmer than Ken’s relationship with it. But in my home growing up, church on Christmas Eve was tradition, so I found an Anglican church in Pimlico. And dragged Kenny to it at 11 pm. We’d never been to an Anglican service before, and the research I put into finding out if we could even attend as non-members was extensive. The church was very kind to welcome us, though it wasn’t long before we realized we were actually aliens visiting a different planet instead of foreigners visiting a different denomination. First of all, the ninety-minute service was an exercise in not burning our hands in Christmas candle wax. There are a lot of call and response portions of an Anglican service, and thank goodness they were written down. But I got lost in the chants and incantations many times and murmured “hippopotamus” under my breath until I found where we were in the service. When the service ended, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and raced back to the Windermere to change into pajamas.

We collapsed (yet again) at the end of a marathon day that didn’t conclude until 1 am, ready as ever to sleep in on Christmas morning.

London Day 2

After a long night’s sleep that could have been longer, we stumbled down to the Windermere Brasserie. We ordered hot breakfast and as much coffee as the coffee pot could hold. After a slow morning getting ready in front of the TV (on which we found Judge Judy which would become our primary source of entertainment after 10 pm) we set off to see the sights.

Our first sight was Buckingham Palace, and I think I set the tone for the day when I kept making the hashtag motion with my fingers, and shouting “BUCK PAL!” Which is short for Buckingham Palace, of course. I had seen #BuckPal as a kid, but it was neat to see the impressive structure through the lens of an avid watcher of The Crown. 

We walked through Green Park and stumbled across a series of Eastern European men playing the “spot the ball under the three cups” game. It’s a game I didn’t know anyone was still playing in this century because I thought we collectively agreed as a society that it was a scam. Yet there were three men who were determined to keep the scam alive. Here were my two theories about the game, and they could be true or wildly far-fetched.

• The men used magnets to suck the ball up to the top of the metal cups so the ball would disappear.
• The guys had friends in the crowd who were bad at the game, making others in the audience feel like they could make some easy money at the game.

Whether or not my guesses are true, here’s what we know about this age-old scam. In order to qualify to guess where the ball was under the cups, you had to give money. If you guessed correctly, you got the money. But if you got the money, you had to give some portion of it back in order to guess again. The only way you can make money from this game as an audience member is if you guess correctly, take the money, strap on your best pair of Nikes, then do your best Usain Bolt impression down Green Park with your two twenty pound notes in hand. At one point, one of the men called on Kenny to guess, and I pulled us both back into the mud on the park while trying to explain to him that to guess, he’d have to give some pounds, and at our current spending rate, we were going to have to get very comfortable with eating McDonald’s for the rest of vacation.

We continued on to Picadilly Circus, which was much tamer than I remember from my last trip there. We walked up to the theater district to pick up our tickets for that evening’s performance of Les Miserables, a Christmas gift from family. We then continued on to the LEGO store, Trafalgar Square, and the Thames River.

By the Thames, we finally rested before walking around Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Palace of Westminster, and the London Eye. With time to kill before the performance of Les Miz, we purchased tickets to the London Eye and got some lunch at a stir fry place. The most appetizing thing about this stir fry place was the free Wi-Fi, which gave us the opportunity to check in with our families.

Then we went on our London Eye tour.

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One of the key things that came up by the end of just Day 2 was the importance of expectation setting. I can’t emphasize to you enough how important it is to appropriately set expectations with your travel buddy before embarking on a new journey. I’m the walk till you drop type of vacationer, and averaging 25,000 steps on the Fitbit each day seemed about right for the trip. Kenny is more of the kick-back and relax type of vacationer, better suited for a sandy sunny beach. This difference would remain a constant undercurrent throughout our trip. But more on this later.

We got dinner at a local pub before walking again to the theater district to finally see Les Miz. Dinner was good, once we finally got it. The pub atmosphere was authentic to my memory of the London pub scene, but it was still new to us. We sat at our table for about 15 minutes before Kenny realized we had to order from the bar. 40 minutes later we were at the theater. Les Miz was probably the best and most professional and incredible performance I’ve ever seen and it left us feeling whole. Or maybe that feeling of wholeness was due to the ice creams we bought at intermission. It’s incredible: they bring Haagen Dazs for purchase to your seat at intermissions; every venue should take a cue from The Queen’s Theater on this. We finally walked back to Windermere and collapsed for the night watching Judge Judy.

 

The beautiful chandelier at The Queen’s Theater.

 

London Day 1

Once again, I found myself drawn to the U.K. Maybe it was the terrific trip I had there six years ago, or maybe it was the fact that my travel buddy had never been abroad before, and an English-speaking country was a good initiation trip. Before you begin reading, let me apologize for the delay in posting my travel musings two months after the trip’s completion. I will say that the delay allowed me to write, edit, and rewrite these entries, and I’ll argue they are all the better for it. So as not to do an information dump, I’ll post these weekly. Enjoy!

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Our first day was beyond difficult. We both worked full days on Thursday, December 21 before dropping Teddy at the dog sitter’s, and heading to Dulles for our 9 pm flight to Heathrow. We were seated in the middle two seats of the four seats in the middle of the plane– we were in the sucker seats. I had previously ridden in the very tiny Lufthansa seats so I was used to the grueling challenge of endurance. But Kenny was not. Being the height of the beanstalk talked about in the children’s tale Jack and the Giant Beanstalk, Kenny didn’t get to sleep for any of the journey, and his knees were flattened by the time we landed seven hours later.

Exhausted but excited, we went to immigration at 9 am where we split up for our interviews. (We didn’t know that because we were traveling together, we should have gone for the same interview, thinking only that because we weren’t married, we should have separate interviews.) After a slap on the wrist and a roll of the eyes from a very irritated immigration officer, we got our bags and a taxi to our hotel.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more frazzled tourist moment than when our taxi driver asked “Where to?” in his thick Cockney accent. I could feel this Leave Voter staring at me as I searched in my phone for the hotel address. I was unfamiliar with the city’s quadrants when the driver asked me if the hotel was in “Southwest Victoria One.” Perhaps that’s why we ended up paying 70 pounds for that first cab ride– because I was too exhausted to pay attention to the route, and too scared at the 50 pound milestone to say something to the driver. It was highway robbery, or M4 robbery if you like, but I was just focused on getting to the hotel at that point.

We had been up for 24 hours by the time we reached The Windermere, and it was not welcome news to learn we would have to wait a few hours for the room to be ready. We dropped our bags with the front desk and wandered around the Pimlico neighborhood looking for breakfast. We collapsed in Le Pain Quotidien because it was familiar, and rested for a while. It came as a delight over brunch to discover that my work phone had cell service, so we could make emergency calls and navigate the city with Apple Maps and CityMapper. CityMapper told us that if we were insistent on taking a stand against cabs in London, we’d have to use the London Underground to make the 30 minute trek to Wembley Stadium for the Andre Rieu concert that evening. So we walked to Victoria Station to get Oyster cards.

When it was finally time to check in to the hotel at 1 pm, we crawled back to the hotel, and collapsed in our king bed for three hours. It would be the only three hours of sleep we would have in a day that lasted 36 hours.

At 4 pm, we woke up to get dressed and eat dinner in the hotel restaurant before attending a performance of Andre Rieu’s Johann Strauss Orchestra. This concert was the purpose for our whole trip. I’ve followed the Orchestra since I started playing their arrangement of The Emperor’s Waltz in my college orchestra. It was helpful timing that the Orchestra was playing in London at a time that Kenny and I could take off work.

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The performance was terrific and we definitely enjoyed it. But nature dictated that we had to sleep. So we used the Underground to navigate back to Victoria station, then to the Windermere for some much-deserved sleep. All-in-all, a less-than-enthusiastic first day in London, but our exhaustion was tempered by our excitement of being in a foreign country.