Paris holds the key to MY heart!

I've been dreaming of going back to Paris ever since we left the first time back in 2011. I was especially excited for Nathan to see it, even though I need deep down he would probably hate it because he's such a typical man! It's like liking Paris lessons their manliness or something! We flew there bright and early on the morning of March 30. We got to the airport and had a lovely time walking across the entire concrete monstrosity with our incredibly heavy backpacks finding the train that takes you into Paris. Really, it wasn't too awful!

Once we got to Paris, we managed to get super confused on the metro somehow and got really grumpy wondering around the undergound and then above ground because we got lost there too and couldn't find out hotel. Anyway, we found the hotel and just dropped off bags off and then wandered around Paris for several hours.

First we headed out of the hotel, which was right down the road from the Place de la Concord, and walked over there. Then we walked along the Seine until it brought us near Notre Dame. That cathedral...no words. It leaves me in amazement every time! I was actually surprised how covered in tourists it was already. I thought that it only being March, it would still be somewhat dead in Paris. I was obviously very wrong!

Our first glimpse of France after crossing over from the UK!

From the tower we started walking and figured we go check out the Arch! Nathan really wanted to see it. On our walk, we saw a bicycle taxi thingy and thought, "what the heck!" So we hopped on and the guy brought us over to Champs Elysee. I swear, he didn't even break a sweat pulling us over there. It was quite impressive and sooooo fun!

After the Arch, which was under construction so we decided not to go up in to it either, we headed back to the hotel to check-in. First though when we walked into our room: OMG! Most amazing room I have ever stayed in! Within a few hours, I received a text from my mom saying she was taking Quincy to urgent care because he split his head open and had to get stitches. I felt just awful! Nathan felt awful too! In fact, he was so worried that he fell asleep for like 3 hours! Ha ha ha! Luckily, everything with my baby Q turned out just fine and he only needed 4 stitches. I think Grandma and mom were more traumatized by the event that he was.

After Notre Dame, we hopped on the metro, which brought back tons of memories from riding around with my little brother a few years ago on it, went the wrong direction, got off, got back on and went back the right direction, and managed to get to the Eiffel Tower. I swear I could stare at the sucker all day long! Amazing! We ended up not going to the top because, once again, there were just too many people and we didn't have time to wait in line!
Anyway, when the evening hit, we decided to go get some grub, so we left the hotel and wandered around Paris for like EVER because neither of us could decide on what we wanted to eat! We ended up at a little Portuguese restaurant of all places. Nathan's food was great; my food was just meh! After pigging out on dessert, we rolled our way back to the hotel and fell asleep! The next morning we woke up later than we had wanted to, surprise, so we were unable to go see the few others things we were hoping to see! We ate breakfast at the buffet in the hotel. And don't let the word "buffet" fool you! This was the fanciest breakfast I have ever seen, as well as the most expensive. Don't worry, we didn't have to pay for it, of course! After breakfast we headed over to the airport to pick up the rental car. We got miserably lost in the metro station, again, and then mid way on our way to the airport, I realized we were on the wrong track, so we had to jump off and hop on another train! Luckily it worked out pretty well. Once at the airport, of course we couldn't figure out where the heck the car rental place was. All the signs said it was in one terminal, but when I finally checked my email it stated the Hertz was in another terminal! After seriously like 4 hours, we got to the rental desk and picked up our ride. We hopped in and headed straight out of the city towards the Dday landing beaches in Normandy! Surprisingly, we didn't get lost once on our drive out of Paris! Weird!

London!

London! Oh, London! You exceeded my expectations by far! I honestly wasn't expecting a lot from London. I mean, I've been to Paris, and that is the most beautiful city in the world, so London just had no hope in my book. Boy, was I wrong. It was soooo beautiful and amazing there. The old mixed with the new, the people, which, by the way, the women there are styling big time! Yeah, I loved London!

When we finally got into town, it was pretty late in the evening, around 8:30pm. We went straight from the Waterloo train station to the metro, and ended up at the Oxford Underground station just a few blocks for our hotel. Unfortunately, things are never as easy as they seam on google maps and we got lost for a good 30 minutes. A super helpful guy waiting by the metro busted out his smart phone and helped us figure out how to get to the hotel. Thanks, awesome London dude! Once we got to the hotel, the real fun began! 

We walked to the check-in desk and the receptionist informed us that we had a private check-in on the 8th floor! Whoa....fancy shmancy! Nathan, the receptionist, and I all headed up the elevator to the 8th floor for our special little check-in! We got everything in order and headed to our room on the 9th, top, floor! As soon as Nathan and I walked into the elevator to take us up, we looked at each other and at the same time said, "We are soooo underdressed!" and let out a good laugh!

The room was amazing and I miss it already. It had an American outlet in it! I could use my blow dryer!!!! You can't ask for more than that!

Okay, so we hit the hay and woke up the next morning all refreshed and ready to get our London on!

First things first, we left our room and headed down the road to the "laundrette!" We had a nice chunk of dirty clothes that needed attending too! We made it inside and were instantly greeted by the MEANEST worker lady person ever, I like to refer to her as Hitler. She was just grumpy and mean and had all these little rules for everyone about using the machines there.

 At one point, while we were sitting in front of the washer waiting for our clothes to finish, I busted out my camera and started taking pictures of....washers. So exciting, right? Well, it must have been too exciting because miss "I hate happiness" quickly nipped my fun in the bud. "NO TAKING PICTURES IN HERE!" Really? Where's the sign? It's a laundromat for heaven's sake! Luckily we survived that experience and left soon after with a load of freshly laundered clothing!

We dropped our clothes off at the hotel and then headed out to find some adventures! We headed over to Oxford street to find Nathan a coat, but it began to warm up ever so slightly, so we decided to pass and continue on with our journey. We headed over towards Trafalgar Square, which was not really intentional, but happened, and then continued on towards Buckingham Palace. We walked through the park right over by the gates of the palace and then made our way over to the Queen herself's house! Honestly, it was a teensy bit disappointing. I was imaging more. Still amazing, though! We spent some time just wandering around that area and then headed towards the London Eye. On our way there, we ended up over by Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and all of those fun historic buildings! We walked through the square agreeing that we would go back tomorrow and go through Westminster Abbey. Over the bridge we walked to the London Eye. Somehow we got sucked into the "London Dungeons" tour trap and ended up buying tickets to that as well! We decided that we would do the Eye that night and the Dungeon in the morning. The day was already almost over. We may have woken up at like 11am that day!

So, I'm not sure what is wrong with me in that I will walk right onto the London Eye, not even blinking an eye, but I get physically ill on an airplane from my nerves! Whatever! The Eye was amazing. The view was awesome! You really started to get a feeling of just how big London is! The ride took about 30 minutes. We hopped off and then continued on our journey. 

On our quest to find a decent place to eat dinner, we came across a Thai food restaurant on a hidden street just off all the hustle and bustle from the big touristy parts of London! It was sooooo good! I know, I ate Thai food. Don't worry; it had not vegetables or sea food in it, so I was happy!

Morning number two, we checked out of our hotel early, walked over 2 miles with our luggage to our Hilton at Trafalgar Square, asked them to hold our luggage, and then we headed over to see Westminster Abbey and do the Dungeon Tour. Westminster was AMAZING! I'm still mind blown at how many people are buried in there.

That was one massive church!

We headed right on over to the Dungeon tours after Westminster. Oh boy, what a treat...NOT! It was sooooo boring! We thought we were going to be seeing some real dungeons, or get a history lesson on London's bloody history. Instead, we got an expensive spook alley where they kept trying to scare you and you kept wanting to punch someone in the face. Seriously, the first half hour they kept making us, about 30 in the group, move into an empty room, wait for 5 minutes, all cramped inside, then walk to another room, where they would cram us all inside and make us wait again for 5 minutes! Sooooo dumb! Towards the end, it got a tiny bit better, but definitely not worth the money or the time!

Okay, after the Dungeon fiasco, we decided to go see a real place with a bloody history: The Tower of London! It was about 2.5 miles from our location. We started walking and came upon a bike rental. We had talked about hiring a bicycle while we were in London, but watching the other cyclists riding with traffic was enough to give me an ulcer. We knew if we didn't hop on a bike, though, we were not going to be able to do all the things we wanted to. So, we bit the bullet and rented a bike. The trip there wasn't too bad at all. It was a little nerve wracking at times riding up the streets with the traffic and squeezing in between parked and moving vehicles, but for the most part, it wasn't too bad.

We made it to the Tower and because it's still March, the tourist crowds were relatively low, so we didn't have to wait in any lines or deal with insanely large hoards of people! There were definitely people there, but it was bearable!
We started off with a guide, but it got a little boring, so we broke off from the group and made our own way around the Tower. Pretty awesome, for the most part.

After the tower, we hopped on bikes again and began our journey back to the hotel. The trip back was much more terrifying than the journey there. We had to ride through a tunnel with traffic zooming on both sides. I thought for sure I was done for! We got to the hotel and headed out again to find some dinner. We settled on a Brazilian place that kind of sucked! Seriously, the food was not very good. The walk up there was fun, though. Somehow we ended up in Chinatown, which was sooooo cool! I didn't even know London had a China town until we stumbled upon it. After dinner, we made a quick stop in the gigantic M&M shop, still not sure what the appeal of that stupid place is, and then headed back to the hotel. We had to be up incredibly early to catch our plane to....Paris!

Coventry (Southam) and Salisbury (Stonehenge)

We left Edinburgh bright and early that morning; we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to catch our 5:30 long train ride to Coventry, England! We made it to the station with plenty of time to spare, or so we thought. I swear the train gods were working against us that morning. I couldn't get my phone to connect to the internet to look up our booking number and print off our tickets. I could have SWORN I had already printed them off, but when we got to the station, they were no where to be found. When I asked the man working at the counter if he could look it up for us, he said that the only thing that could be done was for me to email him our pdf file of the tickets and he could print it off there. Of course, like mentioned above, I could NOT get the internet on my phone. It was sooo incredibly frustrating. Finally, the worker told us to just run for the train and see if they would take our copy saved on my phone once we got on. This was 1 minute before the train left, by the way. So we take off and literally get in front of the train door and....closed! Oh man, I was sooo angry. I threw a little hissy fit because of how mad I was. We had to go back and buy more tickets, which cost a small fortune, by the way! Such a joke. I'm getting mad all over again just thinking about it!

The train ride to Coventry was relatively unexciting; I fell asleep in a really creative, and impressive if I do say so myself, position! Slept most of the journey. Woke up, stared out the window for a while, finished my book, "Walk Two Moons," and repeated, but with different books. 

When we finally got to Coventry, it was raining...surprise! We left the train station immediately and ended up getting a cab to our hotel since it was outside the boundaries for public transport. That's what I get for trying to save "money" (points) on a hotel. Save on the hotel, pay for the transport! Sometimes my insane cheapness doesn't workout quite like anticipated. Okay, on the way over we started chatting with the cab driver who told us he would take us to our hotel, wait for us while we checked in and dropped every thing off, and then drive us to Southam, drive us around Southam and then back to our hotel at Coventry for a great price, which was in pounds, which is a great price if you make pounds, but we make dollars, so it wasn't so great! 

The drive there ended up being the second most fun thing we did on this journey, second only to our nerd fest at the gaming store in Edinburgh! That driver was HILARIOUS! We found out his whole life story, which included: He was from Kashmere, but has lived in Coventry almost his entire life; he has 6 kids, but is not Irish or Catholic; he doesn't drink; he got married at 18; and most importantly, he loves flying because he LOVES airplane food! But seriously, this guy was a riot! He had just as much fun as we did driving around the tiny town of Southam and taking pictures of us! We totally made him hop in a picture!

Our hotel in Coventry was surprisingly not awful. It was a pretty old and slightly stinky Holiday Inn, but we got put in the "executive room," so it was tolerable. But really, it actually was pretty nice. I couldn't fall to sleep that evening because I had slept all day on the train. It was a lot of fun when I was still rolling around in bed at almost 1 am, watching some totally weird "iron chef" but for hair dressers show where they had to give their model a "mohican," not mohawk according to the host because, and I quote "Americans say mohawk because they are lazy!" Jerk! I finally got sick of the show and decided to go workout. That did not workout at all. I didn't have tennis shoes, so I figured I would just look like a freak and go workout in my gold glittering toms. Did I mention another reason why I couldn't sleep was because my husband snores like, well, I don't know! Like nothing you've ever heard! It's out of control! Back to working out. I left the room, went downstairs, the gym was closed, left my key in the room, couldn't get a new key because I didn't have my id, and couldn't wake Nathan up over the snoring. Needless to say, I spent about 30 minutes outside that door in the stinky hallway waiting for the hubs to wakeup. I just kept sending him messages via Facebook and eventually the persistent vibrating was enough to wake him from his blissful coma!

Alright, next morning we left the Holiday Inn and took another cab back to the train station. The cab driver this time around was just as friendly and fun as the last driver. Coventry cab drivers should win an award for funnest and most friendly cabbies! We FINALLY made our train this time! Yay! We were off to Salisbury to make a quick trip to Stonehenge and then on to London!

Salisbury was soooooo beautiful! Nathan and I were so bummed once we started riding our gigantic double decker tour bus to Stonehenge through the city and seeing all the amazing sites! We want to go back to the UK just to spend time there. 

We made it out to Stonehenge. It was INSANELY freezing and rainy and there were like 3 different GIGANTIC groups of teenage school kids visiting. It was a little obnoxious and, well, they really kind of ruined the experience a little bit! Stonehenge really was amazing, though. I have been dreaming of visiting that place for a LONG time! On the way back to the station, Nathan and I were the only ones on the bus, so we did absolutely nothing exciting and sat in the front row on top and watched and wondered how the driver didn't run over people, cars, and entire buildings! 

We made it back to Salisbury in one piece and then went straight to the station to catch our train to London! Yay! It was definitely a little bit confusing figuring out our tickets, but this great attendant helped us, which made it so that we didn't have to wait an hour and a half to catch our train and got to London much earlier!