Perfect Plan!!
We
searched and did our research for a few months. Looking up the cheapest
flights and all the best sights to see. It all came down to seven weeks
of traveling. We are starting with a week in London. Then we take a bus
to Paris where we will spend 4 days. Next has us taking an all night
bus up to Frankfurt, Germany where we are going to rent a car for two
weeks. I believe this is Jeff's favorite part! After two weeks of
exploring the cities of Germany, Vienna and Salzburg, Austria, we are
flying into Pisa, Italy to spend three weeks with my family that lives
in southern Italy! If you want to see this pregnant lady gallivanting across Europe feel free to follow along! I had a goal to stay fit during this pregnancy and I think I have put myself into a position where I will be forced to exercise!! I just pray he decides to make it easy on me ;)
LET IT BEGIN
The Shirts Family Adventure
wouldn't be complete without
Orange Backpacks!!!
Leaving from Spokane Washington
March 24th, 2014
Traveling on the off season
was a wonderful idea!
Pick a row, any row, and sleep.
OK!!
To try and beat jet lag we stayed up for the rest of the day and went exploring.
First Stop:
LONDON
March 25th-31st, 2014
Fish & Chips in a Pub!!
In Front of the
National Gallery
This view bellow looked like Classic London to me... so I tried to capture it :)
Big Ben
Double Decker Red Buses
Statues
Old Beautiful Buildings
and
Business Men Rushing By
And this one is just for Janneke!
The only problem was that someone had mistaken it for a loo. . .
The best advice we can give when traveling, well anywhere, would be to look up your sleeping arrangements on www.airbnb.com. People all around the world rent out either a room of their home or their entire appartment. It is a great way to get cheap prices and meet locals that can help you find out about all the local hot spots!
That is what we did in arranging all of our hotels. Our first experience is going great! The guy who is renting to us is very social (gave us great directions) and loves meeting foreigners, like us :) It is an interesting place. We have to enter through an alley way, in the last apartment upstairs.We enter with a key and then go up a flight of stairs to the common kitchen. Up another flight of stairs is a shared bathroom and our private room. Apartments and homes seem to be set up much differently than ours. Later in the week we stayed with our good friend, Alli and her fiance Jan, at the airbnb they rented. It was a private flat and closer to downtown London, but you still shared the bathroom with the other apartment in the building.
These first couple nights we could not get the radiator to work so it has been FREEZING! But the shower has hot water so we take extra long showers and then hop right into bed! A perfect way to end a day full of walking.
The second best piece of advice we can give is Get a London Pass!If you come to London it is necessary! London is expensive! We are quickly learning how true that is! The food, attractions, and traveling are all crazy prices. It also isn't helpful that one pound is equaled to $1.68. Everywhere we turn we are losing money, but we are also seeing amazing sights. The London pass is about $120 for one person for three days of getting into all attractions for free. It is worth it! After our three days, with all that we toured, without the London Pass we would have spent around $220. It saved us a lot!
Our First Stop of the Day:
Channeling my inner Mary Poppins!
Where is my umbrella?
London can always use a good plank :)
Tower of London
Some of the things we learned: It's a Medieval Castle where many
heads were chopped off. Henry VIII lost a few wives to that method. The Crown Jewels were pretty spectacular, I
would have to say. Massive and beautiful is the most accurate description I can
think of. Also, the actual castle part of it has the world's longest running
tourist attraction! It's a bunch of wooden horses with suits of armor on them.
Pretty spectacular if you ask the people of the 1700's.
Tower Bridge
We got to the top and see the engine room!
So cool! There were some crazy ideas that were proposed by
those "Jetsons" thinking Londoners of the 1800's, but this beauty,
after some tweaking, was built. The steam-hydraulic system that was used to
raise and lower the bride decks was revolutionary, but now there are electric
motors. A lot less complex, and infinitely less cool. There has been a double decker
bus that jumped the raising bridge decks, a biplane that flew through the
upper and lower deck, and fighter plane that reenacted it. Pretty cool if you
ask me.
My husband LOVES reading ALL the facts!
The Globe Theater
This is a Shakespeare quote that we found in the souvenir shop!
For the evening we decided to get on any double decker bus and see where it took us! We found some beautiful places!
That is St.Paul's Cathedral in the distance while walking across the Millennium Bridge.
While in London I, Jeff, had to buy a copy of Top Gear Magazine. Getting it shipped to the states is super expensive, but in Britain it is not! It was so good to read, and I read every article. It was full of Top Gear humor and it was fun to see how they wrote. I also brought a copy of Motor Trend and it is interesting to see how different they write. Top Gear has humor thrown in all over the place, while Motor Trend is just the facts. Top Gear is better, but I guess Motor Trend will have to do. We also had to take a picture of "Mind the Gap" because they say it all the time when getting off the Tube, or really any train.
Day Three: March 27th, 2014
Windsor Castle
Opulance to the MAX! What else would you expect from a royal
palace? First, there was the massive
doll house replica of the state apartments of the castle. Barbie Queen Victoria
even had running water, electricity, and
all the books and painting were just miniature versions of the real things made
by the real people. Then we strolled through the various rooms adorned with
tasteful, and "I'm-glad-the-king-liked-it" artwork. The interesting
fact of the day was that in 1994 some "cross people"( quoting Prince
Charles from the audio tour)set the place on fire. It burned a large portion
of the state apartments of the castle, but that was dutifully restored to
prefire 2.0 condition, including all the gold gilding and fine furniture. One
interesting technique that was used in a large room where the ceiling was gone,
but the floor was only charred was to flip each piece of the intricate wood floors over and viola! New
wood floors.
Here's a video we took of it:
A Video of the same spot!
Saint George's Cathedral on the Castle grounds.
Windsor town is adorable too! Filled with cobble stone streets :)
Kensington Palace
Finding the Palace we cut through a neighborhood that happened to be lined with men holding big guns in front of large homes. We found all the ambassadors homes :)
This
was an art piece they had for Queen Anne who had 18 pregnancies. All
died as infants. Only one, Prince William, made it to age 11 before
passing away. It was a very sad story. If they had only realized too
much inner marrying within the family causes diseases.
Fun things and places we found as we went wondering this evening!
This is one of my favorite times of the day. When all the attractions close and we don't feel rushed :)
Who wouldn't want some McLaren 12C Spyder??
This is how the extremely wealthy shop. I just wanted to see
if there were any exotic cars parked outside, and lo and behold, up screams a
Ferrari 458 Italia.
Amber's childhood dreams relived.
Piccadilly Square
Chislehurst Caves
Not far from our airbnb was the coolest cave! They
are approxamintly 22 miles long are were first created 4 thousand years
ago by the Saxons. We got to see a mile of them!They have been used for
many things since. The latest use was during World War Two for
thousands of people to hide during bombings. There were churches,
theaters, barbers, hospitals, dance classes etc. down in the caves. The
numbers on the walls that we took a couple pics of were like street
numbers to them. Each street above ground had a street bellow ground.
That is where they belonged during the bombings. After the war up until
the 70's they had concerts in the cave. Bands like: Led Zeplin, Jimmy
Hendricks, and other famous people!!
These
are some of the faces that were carved by the soldiers during WWI when
it was used as an arms depot, and the citizens during WWII. Some were
good, some were . . . nice.
The street names
A carving made by a lady in the 80's
Our next stop was the Westminster Abbey. Next door was parliament and Big Ben :)
Talk about a beautiful church crammed full of amazing
carvings and statues. It's too bad we couldn't take pictures of the inside,
because it was beautiful. It was like walking into a hoarders house, albeit
massive, who loved finely sculpted stone and famous deceased people. We saw the
grave of Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Jane Austin, Various Kings and
Queens of England, Handel and a large ode to Shakespeare. Too bad the Coronation Chair was in a closet
because of restoration work going on in the large glass room where it is
normally kept for the peasants to gawk at. Shame.
The back of a statue of Winston Churchill
View from our River Cruise
Near the Design Museum
This was pretty awesome. Designer Paul Smith made lots of money
making clothes, because of this he made
a museum to design. That sounds rightly boring, right? Wrong. There are some
boring bits about making clothes, but then I, Jeff, realized that he and I
share the same philosophy! Subtle clothes on the outside, awesome on the
inside. He would definitely approve of my tux, that's all I have to say about
that. Then there is the section where he has things in various stages of being
made. There is a sheet of £50 notes that aren't cut yet, a fork that has just
been stamped but not shaped, a huge sheet of green felt with ovally shaped
things cut out of it where the ovally things were used to make tennis balls, a
large chunk of man-made crystal that would eventually be made into optical
lenses and a polyethylene chair where it was stopped mid injection of the
polyethylene into the mold so the seat wasn't finished, but you could see that
the sections were flowing toward each other. It was pretty neat.
Have An AMAZING DAY!!!
Day 5: March 29th
A really exciting part of these next two days is that a great friend of ours, Alli, and her fiance Jan, were able to fly in from Europe to play with us!
STONEHENGE
It brought back many memories as we rode the tour bus to
Stonehenge. About seven years ago I went
on an incredible six week study abroad through BYU-Idaho. We traveled through
Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, and France. There were so many highlights
for me. One of my absolute favorites was coming to Stonehenge. Our group was
extremely lucky and were able to come and watch the sunrise while having free
range of Stonehenge, walking around and touching the ancient stones for an
hour. I can't explain what or why, it
could be just the peace that comes from being in nature, but I remember the
overwhelming comfort and peace that comes from the Spirit as I explored. We
don't have the records to know what events took place in this circle of stones,
but I can imagine that with all the effort and energy that was given to build
it, it had to have religious content. It is a place to let your imagination go
wild :)
Master of the sheep :)
Day 6: Sunday March 30th
It was Mother's day in Britain and fast Sunday because next
week is General Conference. Hearing so many bare their testimonies in an array
of accents was a comfort to know that the Gospel is the same everywhere you go.
Sunday school was a hoot! The teacher was a strong tempered British women from
York. She would scold people for being too loud and then reassure the room that
she loved them all. The ward that we went to was the Hyde 1st ward. The
building was near the natural History Museum and Hyde park. The sun had begun to come out and was warming
things up for the first time that we had been in London. ! No more layers and
rain coats! We took the opportunity to
explore the park. So did many others, the park was packed. As we strolled
though Hyde park we saw the King Albert Monument that his wife Queen Victoria
made for him. He loved music and across from the monument was Albert's Concert
Hall. The most important part of the stroll was that Amber got her Ice Cream
Cone!
After about an hour of enjoying the park we
found our way to the Wellington Arch. It was a monument that was erected to
commemorate the Duke of Wellington's defeat of Napoleon.These next words are directly from Jeff:
"So what if they beat Napoleon, this massive roundabout had
exotica driving around it continually. There were 3 Audi R8s, at least 15
Porsche 911s, 4 Aston Martins, a few Lotuses, and a Ferrari 360 Modena. And all
this took place in 15 minutes time. I was happy to sit there all day."
The Serpentine in Hyde Park
Ice Cream was a must 
Hazards of a language barrier!
The Wellington Arch
Buckingham Palace 
"Please let me in! I want to be a princess!!
The cute couple!
We could not take any pictures inside the National Gallery so here are a few things we saw:
Monet, Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, and lots of other famous
painters. I could spend hours in here.
Amber even got to join in a demonstration for Taiwan's
Democracy out front!
Beautiful side streets we found as we strolled!
The British Museum
8 Million pieces and we had 1 hour. We saw some dead
Egyptians, Cleopatra, naked Romans, massive Assyrian monuments, the Rosetta
stone, Anglo-Saxon hordes and that was only a small piece. Many hours could
have been spent.
So Let us sum up:
Buy the London Pass
Airbnb's are awesome
Oyster Cards are the cheapest way to travel on the days you aren't using the London pass with travel.
Best food: Fish & Chips, Samosas, Hummus, and Green Apples. They are way better than the ones in America.
The End!
London was awesome, and we can't wait till we get to come back to it for a day before we fly out.
Next up: PARIS!
Hopefully it doesn't take as long to get the next blog up, but we can't promise it will be any shorter!
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