Pinkies Up!

Honeymoon Day 2 - London Day 2

The day started off a little rough.  I could not for the life of me figure out how to get either the hairdryer (and converters) I brought with me or the hairdryer provided by the hotel to work.  It turns out there are 3 different power plugs ins in our room.  One in the bathroom that uses a little converter with just two round prongs (and does not have enough power to run the hairdryer), another plug that is all over the room and powers the lamps, and finally, a strange looking plug hidden behind the desk with its own switch that finally turned on the hairdryer.  So needless to say by the time I figured out how to use the hairdryer, my hair was mostly dry.  So it was straight today.  :)

We started off our day with breakfast at the hotel.  It was mostly a cold breakfast of toast, croissants, some cold meats and cheeses and excellent coffee.  We then headed down the road to the bus stop for the Big Bus Company tour.  Once we found our bus we climbed to the top level and settled in.  The bus took us all through city and included headphones for a recorded tour as we traveled along.  We saw all the major sights of the city including Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, the London Bridge, and Saint Paul's.  We also got brave and "hopped off" at Harrods Department Store.  That place was amazing.  Everything from top designer clothing, shoes and watches to freshly made foods spanning the globe to a vast collection of cigars, wines and whiskey.  We grabbed a couple of sandwiches and hopped back on the bus to enjoy.  We arrived back at our hotel after 5 hours on the bus and took a nice nap before part 2 of our day.

Fully refreshed from our nap, we cleaned up and put on our "smart casual" attire to head for afternoon tea at Browns Hotel.  The hotel called us their cab (which was a Mercedes) and arrived just in time for our reservation for tea.  We stepped into a beautiful old hotel that turned out to be the first hotel built in London almost 200 years ago.  We were shown to a corner couch with a table and our tea adventure began.  Neither of us knew exactly what to expect, but we can both say that it was a great time and we highly recommend it to anyone visiting London.  We each picked our tea (I chose lemon verbena and Trent got Browns afternoon tea - both were very good) and then they brought us a tower of finger sandwiches, fresh scones and desserts.  We also splurged and got a glass of champagne to go with our tea.  The food and tea were amazing and never ending (they just kept bringing out more food whenever we would clear a plate).  After almost two hours of sipping on tea and snacking on the yummy food we decided we needed to get moving again and headed out.

The rest of our day was spent wandering through another part of Hyde Park across from our hotel and  nearby shops.

Tomorrow is the day that Trent has been looking forward to since we booked this trip...the day at Kew Gardens.  Tomorrow will be our first attempt at the Tube (subway) so wish us luck!

Love you all!
Kristen & Trent

P.S.  Turns out we can't post photos to the blog from the iPad.  We will be able to post from the iPhone later, but as we can only get wifi on one device at a time, no pictures yet.  Sorry!  I will try to find some free wifi tomorrow before we hit Kew Gardens and post a few.  Otherwise I promise to post some when we get to Paris and the hotel wifi is free.