London Part 1

Here we are, 7:30 in the morning when we arrived at the bus station in London without a map, wearing the same clothes as yesterday and completely sleep deprived. 

We were feeling a little lost.

Lucky for us, London is packed to the gills with maps at every street corner. Thank you to the founders of London for thinking of people like us who thought they could just "wing it"....

We found our way to Hyde Park and had to take a short breather. Our bags were SO DANG HEAVY!

 (we decided it would be a good idea to spend $60.00 on sweets back in Edinburgh right before we took our car back and had to drag our luggage around everywhere. Really good idea on our part...)

We were kind of at a loss at this point.

We were dead tired, it was only 7:45 am and we couldn't check into our hotel until noon.

Plus we had no idea where we were going and could hardly muster the brain energy to find a bench.

Ha ha we must have been quite the sight to see!

I think people felt bad for us, because every time we stopped to look at the maps, a local would offer to help us find where we were going. I will say, I was surprised by how kind the people of London were. So many strangers offered to help us find our way!

As we were walking through the park 

(which is SO GINORMOUS, by the way) 

trying to get to our hotel, we stumbled across a cute little cafe and decided to take our time eating a proper English breakfast. 

  Notice the baked beans and toast... 

We ate this at every single breakfast we had in England.

And I don't know if you can tell from this picture, but if you look closely at Jake's plate, you'll see a black looking thing in the middle of it. Not the mushroom... the other black looking thing.

It's called blood pudding, and is exactly as the name says.

I had already thrown mine on Jake's plate, 

because I wasn't even going to smell that thing, let alone taste it!

Haggis was enough of an adventure for me.

After we ate our breakfast very, very slowly (we still had like 4 hours to burn...) We strolled through the park on what was the most BEAUTIFUL day in London!

The skies were so clear and blue and in hindsight, we were extremely lucky that this was the day we walked 2 miles to get to our hotel and not the other 3 days when it was pouring rain.

FINALLY rounding on the corner to our hotel

We made it!

After we dropped off our bags, we decided to go out and explore the Portobello Road market

It was probably a mile long and filled with vintage/antique booths and stores... so fun! (And I didn't even notice the NO PHOTOS sign until I was just posting this... oops.)

The rest of the night was pretty uneventful, as we were just too tired to do anything... but the next day was my one of my favorite parts of the trip! Since there's lots of pics, 

I'm going to give it its very own post.

Follow us on to the next post to read about 

The London Chocolate Tour!