Ah, London

We stayed in London for four days last week for our first extended "holiday".

First a word on "holidays". Unlike the US, holidays are vacations. Vacation is a word you never hear, unless you happen to be talking to another American. The exceptions to this rule are Bank Holidays, which are really holidays but have nothing to do with banks. Still, there is something to be said for an entire nation keeping banker hours.

Anyway, we originally planned to go to London for four days, Windsor (just outside London) for two days and Wells (southwest of Windsor, near Bath) for a day. After three nights of the four of us sleeping in one room together, I was ready to either go home, pick up a substance abuse habit, or investigate the magical world of acute psychosis.

Holiday Tip #1: Get a suite or get two rooms.

London was fantastic. And expensive. Fantastically expensive.

For the first two nights we stayed at the Grange City hotel, which is a stone's throw from the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge (which is the cool bridge, not the London Bridge which is really quite dull). Very nice hotel. Great room. Very expensive. Breakfast for four? $100. Laundry service? $100. Coke and a Kit Kat? I don't know; we failed the credit application process.

Holiday Tip #2: Don't eat at the hotel.

Still, the location made the expense worthwhile. It was really great to just walk out the door, cross the street and bam, there are two of London's most recognizable landmarks. We learned our lesson at breakfast and ate outside the hotel for our remaining meals.

We spent most of a day at the Tower. It was pretty incredible to walk through tower rooms covered in 600 year old graffiti carved into the walls by prisoners. Getting a sense of the history of the place was almost overwhelming. We did see the crown jewels (no picture) and a horse's rear end (picture), among other things.

That afternoon, while Elaine and Mallory napped, Quentin and I popped west a few miles and rode the London Eye. THe Eye is an absolutely ginormous ferris wheel that projects out over the Thames directly across from Parliament. The view was incredible. Quentin remarked on how the people looked like ants (trite, but cute) then proceeded to pretend to stomp on them through the glass floor of the ferris wheel car. That's my boy.

After we rode the eye, Quentin and I bypassed Madam Tussade's and the Salvador Dali museum to hit a place of real cultural importance: The Star Wars exhibit at the Town Hall. We got off to a cracking start - as we entered, an actor dressed as the Emporer was leaving. Quentin naturally turned and ran. That set the tone for the rest of our visit: Lifesize Hoth snow-creature - Run! Darth Maul - Run! Lifesize wookies - Run! Darth Vader - Run! Nothing says wholesome family fun like barely controlled panic.

The next day we checked out of the Grange City and checked in to the Premier Travel Inn, which was apparently named by people completely unaware of the definition of the word "premier". The staff was very nice and the room was clean but the room itself was cramped for four. The Premier Travel Inn is located near Hyde Park, Kensington Palace and several museums. None of which were high on our list of things to see. Hyde Park is pretty tame, the museums aren't really a great spot for a two-year-old and Kensington Palace looks distressingly like the Colonial Williamsburg Visitor's Center.

Holiday Tip #3: Spring the extra bucks for a nice room near the sights you want to see.

We went to the Natural History Museum. We were delighted to see that about 30 million Londoners had the same idea. After waiting in line in the rain for an hour, we got inside and elbowed our way to the insect exhibit. This portion of our trip ended about when Mallory saw the seven foot robotic scorpion. We spent some time in the mineral exhibit (quite a nice collection), then went to see the dinosaurs. Apparently all 30 million people from the line outside were now queued up for the dinosaur bones. We left and got pastries and coffee from a nearby patisserie.

Holiday Tip #4: Avoid free indoor activies when it's raining, unless you like the smell of 30 million damp Europeans crammed into a building.

Next day we're supposed to go to Windsor. Elaine catches me sitting in the empty bathtub in our hotel room, rocking back and forth and quietly mumbling about personal space, so we agree to cut our visit short - but not until we visit Westminster Abbey.

Westminster Abbey is awesome. And not in the "Break Point" sense of the word - it actually inspires awe. So many key figures in British history are buried there. Some of the tombs and crypts dated back over a thousand years. You couldn't take two steps without bumping into some King or Queen's remains. Henry the 2nd, Mary Queen of Scots... they even have the "coronation chair" on display, where many Monarchs sat as they were crowned. We thought it was funny that built into the coronation chair is a space to hold a rock that the English stole/captured from the Scots.

The abbey itself is beautiful - particularly Lady's Chapel (where many monarchs are buried). The cloisters, with the ancient chapter house (and the oldest door in Britain! so strange that a place that boasts the tombs of kings equally promotes the age of its door) are beautiful. The windows were replaced in the 50s (after WWII's bombing) but the tile floors were 800 years old, and the statuary as old or older.

Sadly, photography isn't permitted inside the minster, but we got a few shots outside and in the cloisters.

After our visit we picked up a rental car at Heathrow and drove back to Nottingham. It was good to just rest for a few days before heading back to work. We'll need to make another trip or two south (to Bath, Salisbury and points west once, and again for Dover and other eastern sites).

Holiday Tip #4: You can drive really fast on the M1, if you tell your wife the numbers on the speedometer are kilometers per hour (they aren't).