Friday April 3

Well things have finally settled and are starting to return to "normal" around home. We have been back for almost 2 weeks now and I have to admit it took longer to recover from this trip than most. It could have to do with the fact that we must have put in 5-10 miles of walking daily while in London and Paris. It was worth every ibuprofen that I took. I can't even begin to name all the places we went and saw, but here's a shot at it. We arrived in at London Heathrow on Friday April 3. From there we used the pre-purchased transport tickets, and took the Tube into London. After checking into our hostel, The Royal Bayswater Hotel, we took our things to our room ( I had booked the 4 beds for the 3 of us, with ensuite bath) to find it still dirty from the previous guests. When I mentioned this to reception, she said they would get to it soon. (Well my parents owned a motel all my childhood life, and you NEVER gave out keys to a dirty room.) The local was excellent, it was right across the street from Hyde Park, with 2 different subway lines within 3 minutes walk. For our first adventure, we headed over to the Beatles Store, from there of course to Abbey Rd. Than for lunch for our first taste of the local fish-n-chips. It was hard to say if it was good or not, since we had only eaten airline food for the past 24 hours. (But it did taste yummy) We decided to pretty much call it a day, and headed to Tesco (grocery) and than back to our room, which by the way was now cleaned and turned out to not be so bad after all. We each took a nice hot shower and flopped into bed.