London

June 01, 2025

After nearly losing our luggage after our last bus ride in Jordan (see previous entry); we boarded another plane and flew to London. London was our stopover towards home, but it seemed like a good plan to spend a few days there before we went home.

My impressions about London: huge, busy, dirty with garbage everywhere and few convenient waste bins; extremely trafficky with cars, busses, and bikes. The bikes are so plentiful that they have their own lane and their own traffic lights. If you happen to step off the curb, you better be watching or you'll be mowed down by a cyclist. In short, it was a fun stopover, but I wouldn't want to live there.

The first evening we walked around near our hotel which was in Trafalgar Square.

We enjoyed a delicious gelato. A young man dished it up and shaped it like a rose.
I asked him how long it took for him to learn to do that. He said, "a while."

A taxi: Most of the taxi drivers were fun to talk to. Uber was cheaper, once we could make our app work.

We stayed here. It was like a studio apartment, so it was a bit less expensive.

The iconic double decker bus and a view of the city

The iconic phone booth. I stepped inside for a brief second. The phone had a dialtone, but I had to exit immediately because of the stench. It's sad that they don't keep them pristine since they are so recognizable and unique to London. Most of them sported a lot of graffiti.

The London Eye. It moved so slowly you couldn't even tell it was moving.

Big Ben

Me and Queen Elizabeth, or at least a very good wax likeness of her.
She was displayed in a souvenir shop.

Our first activity was to go to Warner Brothers Harry Potter World. We had a lot of fun and took lots of pictures. I'll just leave you with a few. For us this was better than Universal Studios in Florida because it didn't require roller coasters to see the good stuff. This was more of a museum with real props from the movies. Roy thought they could have made it way more exciting if they'd made the pictures move and done a few other special effects.

The 2nd day we toured Windsor Castle, Bath and Stonehenge. It was a whirlwind tour that left us very little time at each attraction. I probably wouldn't recommend that anyone try and see all three locations in one day; but on giving this advice to our tour guide, we were told that no one signs up to see only two locations when they can see three.

Bath. It's an UNESCO sight. Like a lot of other things we saw during this trip, it was a ruin. The water was disgusting. It was fun to see though, so we'll have an idea of what it really looked like when we watch the movies from Jane Austen's era.

Roy in Bath

Everyone should see Stonehenge once. It is interesting that some group of people were able to move these stones from locations that have been determined to have been miles away.

They had some signs with challenges for taking pictures with special effects.

We had a long plane ride home, leaving our hotel at 7:00 London time, switching planes in Atlanta. and arriving home at 8:30 pm in Utah. Of course, we gained seven hours. Since all our flights were daytime flights, we didn't sleep much. I am still getting over the jet lag.

The next morning Roy got up at 5:30 and joined his club on another sideXside ride that left from Fillmore. Needless to say, I stayed home and slept in.