Thoughts on "Day 0"

 Because of *waves hands vaguely* stuff...we will have a full day in and around London, England before our formal tour group meets up. By "full day", what I mean is that we'll be landing at Heathrow airport around 7am, after being on the plane for 7 hours, overnight, and our bodies will think it is 2am.

Everything I have been told about recovering from jetlag is that one should act in the "new" timezone as if it were your "old" timezone. Meaning that we should stay up all day, try to keep active, and do not sleep until after dinner sometime.

So the goal is to find some stuff to do on this Day 0 that will keep us active, but not be too strenuous, and then go back to the hotel at the airport for a good night's sleep. 

Our Wish List

The kids don't have much on their wish lists. I realize that this is my dream trip, not theirs, but they do really want to experience a new country and see "cool stuff". This is a good thing because it means that they have no idea what there IS to see, so if we miss something, they won't even realize it. SA just wants to see "lots of castles" and Liverpool. Ok, that I can manage. (Liverpool is on the Trafalgar Tour we are taking - part of the reason we booked it.) 

I, on the other hand, have a rather long list of things I want to see in London. I strongly suspect I won't get to see them all, but I'm going to try!  The list includes:

• "Big Ben" (part of the Trafalgar Tour)
• Windsor Castle
• Tower of London
• Parliment buildings (Trafalgar)
• Changing of the guards
• Buckingham Palace (Trafalgar)
• St. Paul's Cathedral
• eat at a cafe along the Thames
• "just wander" the streets and take in the local culture

As you can see, there are more than a few things that are on my list that are not part of the formal tour, however, Day 1 and Day 2 of the tour both include "free time" to take in the sights of London. However, without a detailed itinerary yet, I don't know how MUCH free time, or when. So, this is what I'm factoring in when planning our Day 0.

At first, I thought about just doing a Hop On Hop Off  (or HOHO) bus tour.  London actually has 2 of them, there's so much to see. I figured this might be a nice way to get our bearings, see some stuff (even if it's just driving by), but not exhaust ourselves.  One of the stops on this tour is the Tower of London, so I thought we might even get off and do that tour before getting back on and going "home".

Well, then I tried to put together the logistics of the day. We need to start with getting through immigration/customs, finding our hotel, getting there with all our luggage, determining if we'll get an early check-in or not, and depending on that answer - dropping the luggage somewhere, possibly getting changed...or not...and THEN we can look for transportation to go wherever we're going. 

So I was thinking ...11am-ish?...that should be when we're done with all the above. Of course, if things go as well as some people online say, it could be 9am. If it goes even worse than "average" it could be 1pm. So we shall be as flexible as possible...but then I went to a Facebook group with helpful people who live in/travel to London a lot and proposed my idea...and got a lot of constructive feedback. The best tip of all, however, was that the Windsor castle is MUCH closer to the airport than I thought (yeah - first lesson learned: look at a damn map when planning out this crap), and includes a castle, cathedral, and little town to explore...meaning we can take as long or as short a time as we need or have energy for. 

I still haven't bought our timed entry tickets. I'm just worried that if I buy them for noon, we'll have 3 hours to kill before going. If I buy them for 11am, we'll be delayed and not be able to get there til 2. Blarg! What a dilemma! And so, as of writing this, I am stuck in this "fear of making a decision" mode. So if you actually have read this far, please PLEASE leave me a comment and let me know what you think YOU would do in this scenario? (I promise I will NOT blame you if I make the same decision and it goes wrong! LOL) I am learning that listening to others helps me learn about myself. I really want to know.