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)...

An early start and off to Athens today, the capital of Greece, where all the magic happens, where the gods were worshipped and things just worked - well back then it did. We had a nice 7am start to finish cleaning our boats before Dimitri came around to inspect them - while we waited for him we popped over to the little bakery to have a cheese roll - an amazingly delicious Greek pastry with feta cheese. I've said this before - Greek food is my absolute favourite!!  We passed our inspection with flying colours, as did the other boats, so we all piled back onto our trusty bus and started the long journey to Athens. It was about a 5-6 hour drive with a toilet stop and a stop at the Corinth Canal - a canal that many tried to create for hundreds and thousands of years but the rock was too solid to get through until the 1800's. It was pretty spectacular, especially with the blue Mediterranean waters flowing through the middle - a girl in our group decided to bungee jump off the...