From this moment on

Our last day in London - where has the time gone?? It seems like only yesterday we were packing our bags, getting on the planes, meeting out Topdeck family... It's all gone so fast!! I'll try not to get all emotional for all my blog readers out there - but it may be inevitable. I really am such a lucky person - I never thought I would be able to see the world once, let alone twice - and with one of my closest friends as well. Very lucky indeed.  Today we are off to visit the queen!! We want to see Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard. We caught the underground and walked across Green Park to where this massive golden and black gates were - then we saw it. Just like in all the movies we had seen and exactly how I imagined it... Buckingham Palace. The majesty and beauty of this building was like nothing I have seen. Plus the queen lives there! How cool is that?!  We were typical tourists and took lots of photos and then found the prime position to wait out the morning...

Rain rain go away, come again - once we leave London!! PLEASE?? Woke up to another rainy day in London Town... Oh dear. Another day with our umbrellas struggling around, wet and cold, annoyed at the world and angry at all the people who bump us. Oh well - gals gotta do what a gals gotta do! We had two main things on our itinerary for the day - The London Bridge and The Tower of London. Anything else we could get done would be icing on top of or rainy cake! We still had a ticket to Madam Toussards that we had purchased on our first day in London - so we caught the underground out to see what all the fuss was about. Oh my sweet baby Jesus the lines... The lines went for miles and miles - never ending lines. It was pouring rain and we couldn't deal with waiting so we decided to leave. It just wasn't worth the wait for us. Until next time Madam Toussards.  To the London Bridge we went. We walked out of the station and a tour guide man asked us if we needed any help, I told him we w...

Another early wake up - 630am this time, I have no idea why I keep waking up hours before my alarm goes off. I did my best to get back to sleep then decided it was time for Starbucks!! One of the great things about being in Europe... Starbucks EVERYWHERE!! How is it that one district can have 4 Starbucks and we can't even have 1 in Canberra? Just devo. After brekkie we headed down to the station meet Brendan & Roslyn, our tour guides for the day - how amazing are they?! I'm so stoked to have friends who have been living here in London for several months. They know soooooo much stuffs - hopefully I didn't bombard them with too many questions. We all got on the underground and headed to Camden Town to visit the Camden Markets - whoop so exciting! The Camden Markets were so quirky and fun and had soooo many different stalls and things to buy. Clothes, jewellery, food, drink, donuts, blankets, bags, leather goods - there was so much - mostly handmade things (or so they say)...

So I think I am still on Greek time... I tried so very very hard to sleep in but I found myself awake at 530. Oh well... I tried to get back to sleep to no avail. I sneaked a peak through the window... Dark, grey and rain. CRAP. London has really put on a show for our first day. We headed out anyway and picked up a couple of umbrellas from a side street.  We went on a hunt to find where to collect our London Pass tickets from. With a little help from the concierge and my expert map reading skills we were on our way. We were walking past Leicester Square Station and found a shop that was selling cheap theatre tickets - so we made a spontaneous decision and bought some tickets to see Mamma Mia. Yayyyyyyy - we were very veryyyyyy excited, who doesn't love a bit of Abba!! It was about 10am by that stage and we were starving - so we found a corner diner and had a good English fry up brekkie. Just what the doctor ordered. Yum. We found the London pass kiosk and collected our tickets and ...

We woke up nice and early to head down to the foyer to wave or wonderful friends off on the next leg of their journey. It was soooo hard to say goodbye to the close friends we have made on this tour, we all shed some tears and hugs all round. We will definitely be seeing our crew of weirdos again!  We headed back to our room for a nap - we were lucky to have our rooms booked until midday, then we spent some time reps king our bags (to try to fit all the new shopping into our cases) it was a struggle but hey? We got there in the end. We had about 45 minutes until we had to check out of our room so we went on a hunt for food, out the door we found a puddle of blood with some bloody footprints - that was slightly concerning... But we found a little cafe round the corner that had some AMAZING cheese pies (a Greek savoured pastry). Yummmmmm! We got a cab with ALL of our bags to the airport and tried to get on the earlier flight to London - we were booked on a flight to leave at 730... W...

Who even made flying to the other side of the country so GODDAM painful!! Like that is 22 hours of my life that I will never get back! URGH! Being stuck on a plane is just not something that I enjoy... Alysha is DEFINITELY not a fan. 8 hours from Sydney to Singapore - with a 30 minute stopover (which wasn't actually a stopover, we just power walked from one end of the airport to the other) then 13 hours from Singapore to London. OH LORD THE PAIN OF IT ALL! Never have we felt such pain in our legs from being so confined (and we actually got up and walked around and stretched a fair bit). We still ended up with massive swollen pregnant lady feet and drunken room spins (even though we hadn't had any alcohol). And plane food... Don't even get me started on plane food! Except for the roll... Highlight of every meal. You sit there thinking why am I eating this garbage... Then we remembered... Oh the bread roll. LOL. Four absolutely disgusting plane meals - I will definitely have ...