London, England, United Kingdom
Saturday, July 21, 2012

Well today has been a very long day, we took off yesterday from pearson at 6:30pm and did not arrive at heathrow until 6:30 am local time (aka 1:30 your time). Sleeping on the plane over was, shall we say, less than comfortable. We were however fortunate in finding our hotel room already made up by our arrival at 8:30. Therefore our first big adventure in London was to take a power nap at the hotel before heading out to see the sites.
We woke up from our nap at 10:30 and headed out for our first tour at 11:00 ish. It was a good thing we gave ourselves an hour to get there as the directions were pretty vague. On the way Ben and I stopped in an Italian deli for some lunch since we were starving. It was actually quite good and I am pleased with our random seletction. Anyway when we got to th meeting place we realized that 'leichesters square, ticket booth' described every other business within a two block range. ThAnk goodness for a nice man that we asked for directions as he seemed to onions exactlY what we were looking for.
The Harry potter tour was a lot of fun and we had a great tour guide, becky. She showed us around to dragon alley, the leaky cauldron, millennium bridge, platform nine and three quarters, and a few other movie filming sites.
After the tour Ben and I decided to venture to piccadilly circus to do some shopping and browsing. We ended up doing mostly walking but we did manage to find Hamleighs, the largest toy store in Europe. it looked like it would have been an absolute blast to work there. There was 6 floors of toys, including a good set ton of Harry pOtter merchandise. Since our feet were beginning to get sore we decided to head bak to the hotel and take a break before we met with our tour group at 6.
When we went down to the restaurant we learned that our groUp leader would be Jen and that our driver would be howie. We also found out some other details of the trip as well. After the meeting we had a really nice English roast dinner and then headed to covent garden for a few drinks.
All in all the day was a lot of fun, but we were also pretty tired so we ended up coming back to the hotel at 11:00,or for all you back home, 5pm.

Sending you love from London,

Tara