On June 18th we finally got a taste of what a Trafalgar tour would entail. We were positively clueless about how group tours worked, or what to expect at all. This day gave us a little intro into what the next 19 days would be like...
The email from the Travel Director Darren said:
"SATURDAY morning you have a sightseeing tour leaving the hotel at 8.30am with a badged London guide so please go have breakfast anytime before then and enjoy the morning with him/her who will make themselves noticeable to you in the lobby."
So we set our alarms for 7am (I think?) to leave enough time to get dressed, eat breakfast, and get down to the lobby to meet our tour group and local guide. It took quite a bit of time to sort things out, as it turned out there were TWO Trafalgar tours doing the same thing at the same time! Once the local guides figured out who belonged on each of their buses, we were off.
The local tour guide stood at the front of the bus with a clear view of everything in front and on both sides of us. She'd say something like "and on your left, you'll see blah blah blah", and then some seconds or minutes later, we'd get a quick glimpse of the 2nd floor of whatever building it was, and hopefully figure out it was the one she was actually talking about. I did not like this style of touring very much. Granted it gets you to see (ie: glimpse as you drive by) many far-apart-things in a short timeframe, but there was no time to really explore things or see them without someone's head or another bus or unfortunate window reflection in the way.
After a while, we were let off close to Buckingham Palace, in just-barely-enough time to get in place to see the daily Changing of the Guards.
While we were watching, it started to lightly rain. Luckily, we'd prepared for "typical London weather" which we assumed would be quite rainy, and we all whipped out our rain coats and watched the rest of the show. Afterwards, I experienced my one-and-only (I expected more) paid public toilets. I used my tap-to-pay credit card to pay the £0.20 fee ($0.25) to open the turnstile. Then we returned back to the coach to continue our tour and return to the hotel.
We grabbed some lunch and a quick nap, which was a mistake. Little did I realize in my planning that "day of the week" matters, and on Saturdays most tourist sites close early. It was 2pm when we were ready to go back out, but all the places we wanted to see had already stopped accepting entrants, or were going to close by 3pm or 4pm, leaving us no time to travel to and explore said locations. I decided to at least give N her desired ride on the Eye of London, so we walked over there and bought last minute tickets. The wait in line was about half an hour, and the ride itself took about the same amount of time. We got a few nice pictures of the London layout from high up.
It's a bit tough to see in the picture, but from this angle, we noticed a carousel right beneath us!
When we "landed" we contacted S at the hotel and asked if they wanted to join us for a carousel ride. We walked back to the hotel to get them, then back to the park to ride.
We also made our way to the Boots (drug store) inside Waterloo Station (about 2 blocks from our hotel) to find some toiletries and medicines to have with us for the rest of the trip. Stuffy noses were spreading around, and everyone needed a bit of sinus-pressure-headache relief at some point or another in this trip. The Boots closest to our hotel only had a limited selection, and the one in the train station was much bigger! We also knew we'd need to be at this station in 2 weeks to get to London, so it was a good scouting mission, too.
After this, we all went back to our rooms for an early bedtime...our Travel Director had informed us that our bags all had to be outside our rooms by 6:30am the next day, and we had to eat breakfast and be on the bus by 7:30!
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