Europe 2013: London

Tom and Anita were nice enough to offer to watch our kids while we spent 2 days and a night in London. Seth and I had been to London once before in 2007, but really only spent one day in London and our second day visiting Stonehenge. 

It's amazing how much quicker you can move and how much more you can see when you don't have little ones in tow!

Day 1: We got in early in the morning and luckily were able to leave our bags at our hotel. I love when hotels let you do that. London hotels are SO expensive! We spent a significant amount on our room and even though we read reviews, we were a little surprised to see how teeny tiny our room was and found out we had to share a shower and toilet with like 6 other rooms. Yuck. At least it was clean. And the breakfast was pretty good. Anyway, on to the fun stuff: 

We visited the British Museum where we saw Cleopatra's sarcophagus! We also saw the Lindow Man, which was a man found in a bog in the UK in 1984, but they figure he died between 2 BC and AD 119. His body still had skin, hair, and organs! We also went to the Tate Modern Museum and St. Paul's Cathedral. A friend of mine strongly recommended the Tower of London tour and I am so glad we did it! It was really cool. We stopped to try the famous NYC Shake Shack in Covent Garden because we had heard such great things. We were both disappointed and we really like burgers! Seth thinks there is something in London's air that makes things taste bad. We'll have to give it another shot if we ever make it to NYC again. We topped of the night with a showing of The Phantom of the Opera. It was really good, but we were both exhausted and had to watch parts of it with only one eye open so the other eye could rest. 

I've said it a million times before and I say it every time we travel. He's the best trip planner. 

Oldest Royal Palace in the UK. (Pretty sure that's what they said)

Day 2: We rented bikes. It so much fun seeing a city by biking through it. We visited Hyde Park, Victoria and Albert Museum (this was a lot of furniture and fashion design. I could have stayed much longer...Seth not so much), Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, The Natural History Musesum, and the Changing of the Guard. We caught an evening train back to Brussels.  Did I mention all the museums we went to were free? London knows what's up!

Underwhelming. Mainly because we got there too late for a good view. 

This place had the COOLEST dinosaur exhibit. The boys would have either loved it or been totally freaked out. They had a robotic t-rex that I'm not sure was actually life size but it was pretty huge. I also loved the architecture in this building. I kept asking Seth, "what do you think this building used to be for?!" He figured it was always a museum and he was right.