My mom is here!

My mom is here! We spent a lovely weekend in London, last weekend, where her bags were lost. The good thing was that we didn't have to transport her luggage to the hotel. The bad thing was that we were there for 3 days and didn't get the bag until the 2nd day. Our first night, Saturday, Feb. 7, my friend Dawn got us AMAZING tickets to see Wicked on the west end. For those of you who don't know, the west end is London's broadway. We were in the 7th row on house left and I loved it. My mom has heard me talking about this show for years and I was SO happy to have her see one of my favorite shows. She really enjoyed it too.

While walking out of our bed and breakfast in London, on the ground on the sidewalk, was a ONE dollar bill. Can you believe that? I have to go all the way to London to get a dollar. :) Our bed and breakfast wasn't so much a breakfast as it was a bed. The breakfast consisted of coffee, orange drink and toast. It was not at all a bed and breakfast, but what can you do?

Before Wicked, we wandered around the Piccadilly Circus area and had dinner at a pretty normal English restaurant called "Garfunkles." Mom had a chicken dinner and I had a beef stew type thing. Wicked was amazing, as afore mentioned.

Here's Mom playing the total tourist in London in the Underground.

The next day, Sunday, Feb. 8th, we took an open top bus tour where we got to get off and on and see all of London. We rode on the top for a long time until we were totally frozen and then went into the heated lower level of the bus. After riding the bus all over the city, we got off and checked out a huge toy store called Hanley's where we saw a ton of toys on 5 levels including this cool Lego Indiana Jones and a Lego clone trooper. Yes, I got an English Monopoly for my collection.



We got an awesome deal on the bus tour where you paid an extra 3 pounds and got a fish and chips lunch from the Sherlock Holmes pub. We also had Sherlock Holmes ale. It was delicious. We enjoyed the mini museum on the 2nd level of the pub as well where they had a bunch of Sherlock Holmes paraphenilia on display, including Mom's favorite, his pipe.

Here I am in the classic English red phone booth:



We rode the Underground EVERYWHERE and I couldn't get over the announcement "Mind the Gap". My favorite announcement was "Fred to platform 2 to clean up a liquid spillage." I repeated that for days!!! I even took a picture of one of the platforms with the classic Underground saying. See below:

Here's a link to all the pictures if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/LondonWithMom#