Official Day 1

 This is the part of the trip I deemed "Phase 2" in my head - the official start of the Trafalgar tour. We still had absolutely zero information about anything we'd be doing. No word from the travel director at this point. No information about what would be happening today, including any timing. We had our hotel reservation vouchers, though, so we soldiered on with our plan.

We used the "FreeNow" app to request a Black Cab to pick us up at our Sheraton Heathrow hotel, and got to the Park Plaza County Hall hotel lickity split and zero issues (other than N once again getting carsick).  Upon trying to check-in, there was a slight hiccup as the front desk could only find one of our rooms under our name. After I dug out the Trafalgar paperwork, the clerk discovered that they had Curt's middle name as his last name, and all was well.  We asked if our rooms could be near each other, due to wanting to put the kids in one room and us in another. They couldn't accommodate that request, so they upgraded Curt and me to a suite, instead, so that we had a couch and "living room" area so all 4 of us could hang out together. The girls were in a room 3 floors down. We went there first, dropped off their bags, checked out the room, and then went up to our room. We gawked at the view (I mean, look at that...)

 and the spaciousness of the room, and then asked the concierge for advice on where to get something to eat. He pointed us to a little alley behind the hotel, just a block or two away, so off we went on foot.

We stumbled upon "graffiti alley": 

and then found our way to a "pedestrian" street full of food vendors. N found this sign and snapped the picture, I had no idea until I was writing this blog that this was the history of the place! 

After grabbing some delicious bread, more coffee, and some fries, we got ready for our next adventure - finding our way to the Tower of London.

This time, I knew that a cab would be both pricey and a very long trip, and we wanted to use the Underground instead. We got a couple of tips from the hotel's concierge on how to find the nearest station, and off we went. Like the complete tourists we were, we took about thirty billion pictures in the 2-block walk from our hotel to the Underground station...because, I mean, how could you not? Just look at these views!

Finally got to the entrance to the Underground station, and made our way downstairs.

We found the ticket machines and got all-day passes for the girls (in case we wanted to go more places), and Curt and I just used our "tap to pay" credit cards to get on and off "the tube". With a quick confirmation from an employee, we hopped on the next train and off at Tower Hill. 

Upon reaching the surface again, there were signs everywhere pointing us to the Tower and Superbloom.  After much anxiety about how to do this, it turned out to be super easy! (I'm sure all my reading up ahead of time on how the Underground worked helped.)

We did the Superbloom tour very quickly because it was more than 90 degrees in the direct sun without a lick of shade, and the only water we found came out of a black hose lying in the sun (hot soup, anyone?) 

It was so hot, they had even closed the "slide" option to enter the moat, so I was bummed at missing that chance.

Looks like fun! :(

But the views were still lovely, even in the heat.

However, once we were inside the Tower, we were absolutely enthralled. We got there just in time to start a Yeoman tour, so we took that (about 45 minutes long) to learn about the history of the Tower and the many, many famous people who died there. If you know your British history, you know what I mean. If you don't, it'll take about 10 years for me to explain it to you, so let's just move on, shall we? LOL

We had planned to spend about 3 hours here. We actually stayed until they closed and kicked us out (about 6.5 hours total). We absolutely loved every bit of it!! We toured the grounds, the White Tower,  saw the Crown Jewels (again, no pictures allowed in there), met the famous Tower Ravens, missed meeting the Ravenskeeper, and then walked the entire perimeter and explored every room, read every sign, enjoyed every view from the walls, and finally made our way to the church. We talked to the two Yeomen in the church for so long, and impressed him with our love of the place and the history, that one of them invited us as his personal guest to the Ceremony of the Keys that night!! (Unfortunately, we couldn't make it happen, because it was so late, but we were so thrilled to be invited!)

We took so many pictures of the Tower, I couldn't spend all that time filling up this blog! So, I'm trying a shared Shutterfly folder instead. Click here to browse them! https://link.shutterfly.com/HpX642BxArb

We reversed our trip on the Underground back to the hotel, to learn that we had missed meeting our Trafalgar tour director by about 5 minutes. (If we had any information about when he was going to be there, we would've made it back earlier). However, he finally emailed us with details and information, so we felt better knowing what would be happening over the next couple of days. 

At dinner that night, we congratulated each other on figuring out public transportation in a strange city, and having a wonderful day!

View from our room at night. I swear it never got darker than this the entire trip!