The Chunnel, Big Ben and the rocky coast of Wales

We continued our journey early Friday morning with a ride on the Chunnel over to London. It was a two and a half hour train ride and I slept most of it. Public transportation never fails to lull me to sleep.

British Museum

It was rainy when we arrived and navigated our way to the British Museum. I was supposed to meet my pen pal there but unfortunately we never found her and I had no way to get in touch with her. So, we wondered around the museum a bit and then decided to find our hostel because it was getting dark at this time. It was a shady hostel on the East side of London and I am convinced that the owner was most definitely part of a crazy London gang at one time in his life. Out of hunger, exhaustion, and no desire to risk a venture to find food, we went to bed soon after arriving.

Tower Bridge

London Eye & Big Ben

Apple Strudel

We spent the next day walking through the city and enjoying all of the main sites: London Tower, Tower Bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Big Ben and the Parliament building, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye, Trafalgar Square and Borough Market where we shared our first Frankfurter with sauerkraut, an apple strudel, and the most fantastic brownie I think I’ve ever had. It was awesome to see all of the famous monuments and appreciate the hidden cobblestone streets and the architecture of the centuries-old buildings. Hearing the sound of Big Ben ringing was pretty surreal and seeing the tower and massive clock up close was my favorite part of the day. Unfortunately, we arrived at Westminster Square late in the afternoon and we didn’t get to spend as much time exploring that area as I would have liked. We did, however, spend a bit of time in Trafalgar Square where we saw the countdown clock for the Olympics and wandered around the National Gallery searching for a painting of one of Whitney’s relatives. Looking back at it now, we really saw quite a lot in just one day. We calculate it later and determined that we had walked nearly 20 miles with a week and a half worth of travel necessities crammed into one backpack on our backs! It’s no wonder we were so exhausted and hungry when we got to our hostel. 

Yummy pub grub

We dropped off our bags and went up the street to a pub we had seen on our way called The White Swan. The sample plate of several different bar-type foods (sausage, potatoes, nachos, onion rings, garlic bread and chicken wings) and my delicious beer, were a perfect way to end the day… well that and the hot shower at the hostel that relieved some of the muscle aches from the long-days walk.

Sunday started with a visit to Buckingham Palace which, I regret to inform you, was quite disappointing. We just barely missed the Changing of the Guard and the building overall was really nothing special. Most of the rest of the day we spent walking through the many enormous parks and enjoying lunch by the Serpentine lake in the middle of Hyde Park. It was nice to have a day of leisurely wandering up the paths of the parks, surrounded by trees, flowers and green grass. We were sad to find that when we went to King’s Cross station to get our tickets to Wales for the next day, it looked nothing like in Harry Potter. I think this was mostly due to the fact that there was construction being done on the front of the station and we didn’t have access to platforms 9-11 without a valid ticket. We took the Tube back to the hostel to check-in and then saw a bit of the city by night and made our way back to Big Ben to see the area lit up.

On Monday we boarded the train to Holyhead, Wales where we made the decision to spend a little extra money to have a real hotel room for the night instead of a hostel. I must take a moment now to point out that even the sandwiches from the train stations and little corner stores are better than what you could find in some restaurants in America. Whitney and I pretty much lived off of these for most of our travels and I encountered the best one yet in the train station in Wales– hard-boiled eggs and bacon. I digress…

Holyhead, Wales

We arrived at dusk so we didn’t have a lot of daylight to explore in but we took advantage of what we had and made our way down to the dock after dropping our things off at the hotel. It stayed light for quite awhile after the sun went down behind the hill so we ventured through the streets and made our way back to the hotel, picking up some meat pies for dinner and Coco Puffs for breakfast the next day.

The next morning we got up a little earlier to take advantage of our half day in Wales and enjoy the quaint neighborhoods and muddy paths up the coastal hills. It was pretty cold but the scenery was worth a runny nose, wet feet and muddy shoes.

Around 12:30 we headed toward the station to board our ferry to Dublin, Ireland…