I landed last night and Panzer joined me this morning. If you are ever flying into Heathrow Airport, there are a few things that you should know. First of all, passport control is a total bich (can you block that too, you evil, politically correct censorship screen?) and the Heathrow Express, which speeds you into Paddington station in just 15 minutes, costs a whopping £15.50 off-peak and £17.50 peak. And with the British Pound at roughly two times the dollar... that hurts.

Anyway, when I woke up this morning I had the pleasure of driving with some fifth-graders to their school. On the journey I got to hear a rousing rendition of a song they made up. It goes something like this: “Do not peed the figeons, do not peed the figeons, do not peed the figeons and the figeons won’t peed you. Because, if you peed the figeons, if you peed the figeons, if you peed the figeons then the figeons will peed you. So, do not peed the figeons, do not peed the figeons, do not peed the figeons and the figeons won’t peed you.” After doing a quick drop-off, we rolled up to Paddington Station just as Panzer emerged. It was pretty sweet timing.

The rest of the day was pretty absurd. We hoped that we would be able to use our first day to actually accomplish some of the things that were on our mental to-do lists and not let the day go to waste. We left the house at 10 am and started by walking with our hostess and her dog Mini through Hyde Park. The idea was that from there we would find our way to the Embankment, take care of some of the mandatory tourist things, and then meet her back at home at 4. We were sure that 5 hours would be plenty of time; it wasn’t.

Here's the thing about London: It's huge. Always try to set out with a plan because chances are the things you want to see are miles away from each other and on opposite sides of the Thames.  Also, in an effort to save money, we got the 2-Day London Pass thinking that we'd be saving money on admissions for a lot of our stops.  That was our second mistake.  It gives you free admission to a bunch of the more obscure London spots.  In other words it's complete and utter crap.

As we walked, we were checking the map constantly and still taking many unintentional detours. A distance that would now take us about an hour to walk, took two. We did get to see a band of Royal Guards playing at Buckingham Palace, which was nice, and we saw Piccadilly Circus, but nether of these really put a dent in our list. When we finally got to the center of the city, we wanted to go on the London Eye (which, for those of you who don't know, is basically a huge ferris wheel in the center of Central London that gives a good view of the entire city) but the line was huge and we didn’t have the patience and it also wasn't covered by our borderline worthless London Pass. A tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was our next idea (and was covered by the London Pass), but, when we got there, they told us that it was closed for a show. Determined to make the Pass count for something. We then went to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The interior was gorgeous and the view from the roof was incredible and was a pretty decent substitute for the London Eye. This was also the first place where we placed a bovine smile*. We tried to get back to Notting Hill before 4 PM to go shopping with our hostess, but, with more craziness on the way home, we did not make it back until close to 5. It was a throwaway day.

* Wait a minute; I better back up a bit, not everyone knows about the sign. I thought that it would be cool to tag the places that we visit over the course of the trip. I wanted the symbol to be something that encompassed both of our personalities so, after Panzer and I brainstormed a bit, we came up with the idea of a cow with smiley face spots. (The cow was good because it was Panzer has a slight (Read: not so slight) cow fixation and we both worked with cows this year. The smiley face is because I love them. You can see the image in many of our pictures and as a picture itself.) Props to Itamar Conforti, a gifted artist, for putting on paper what was in my head.