So the time finally came, and I landed in Heathrow. The first thing I noticed as we were coming in was the fact that the villages were so close together and not connected at all. It turns out there's a lot of zoning laws that keep the towns very dense.
So I landed in London and we decided to use our "first class" abilities to take a shower and grab some breakfast in the terminals. Let me tell you, they had these individual "freshen up" shower rooms that were better than any bathroom I've ever had!
We handed our luggage off to our courier Richard, and headed onto the tube to go to London. When we got off the tube it was an instant wake up of how beautiful a city can actually be. We decided to go to the Tower of London first. It was the original home of English royalty back in the 1000s.
After that we hoped back on the tube and headed to Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Parliament, and then walked through the park to Buckingham Palace. It was amazing how beautiful everything was for the middle of Jan. There were flowers in bloom, ducks in the ponds, and people taking their dogs out for a walk.
While walking through the parks, I did spend a good 15 minutes watching this dog stare down a squirrel and try to catch it. It was surprisingly entertaining as he inched forward whenever the squirrel wasn't watching. Eventually the squirrel got away though. ):
We then headed to a nice pub in Pickadilly circus and then grabbed some dinner. When we made our way back to Heathrow to be picked up, I managed to grab a picture of this while I was there:
Can you make it out?
It was then a long dark car ride home. I spent all of it talking to Richard about England and everything there is to do here. He was a delightful chap with tons of great stories.
I crawled into bed completely exhausted in Portsmouth and called it a night, sadly tomorrow morning would be work at 7:00am.