It’s Saturday night as I write this, and we have spent nearly our first full day in London, UK. I actually left Honolulu on Wednesday night after an extremely busy day, including having an eye injection in the morning, a session with my amigas in Spanish, and a dentist’s appointment in the late afternoon. With a departure of 10:10 pm, I flew to San Francisco, and then to Burbank Airport to stay with my sister in nearby Sun Valley. The next day, Friday, my son and his family picked me up at 11:30 am and we drove to LAX for a 3:30 pm flight to London Heathrow, lasting slightly under ten hours. To my surprise, sitting next to my 9-year-old grandson on the flight turned out to be easier than I thought it would be, as he amused himself with his iPad nearly the entire trip and barely slept a wink. For me, I got absolutely no sleep at all as per usual.
My friend, Joan Ishibashi, met us at the airport around our 10:00 am arrival and we spent the next hour navigating the Underground to our two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in the Westminster district. But because our room was not quite ready, we dropped off the luggage and set out on a walking tour of Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Parliament. My grandson, Andrés, told me incessantly that “seeing Big Ben was on his bucket list!”(if this is possible in a 9-year-old!) and he was so very excited to be here. My family opted to go to the Paddington Bear experience while I did some people-watching around the London Eye.We all crashed for a few hours back at the apartment until we went out for a fish and chips dinner about 8:30 pm at a local pub.
At a local pub.
The focus of our 7 days in London is to take in all the sights relating to the Harry Potter book series, which Andrés read a few years ago. In preparation for this trip, I read the first book in the series a few months ago, and was happy to see that all Harry Potter movies were on the United entertainment channel. However, I only watched one of them on the flight, but it was good enough to give me a background for our planned excursions.