And I Went Down To London Towne

I went down to London town
To have a little fun in the underground
All the Ladies turned their heads around, saying,
"Donald, where ARE your trousers?"

Its a great song :) But anyway, the purpose of this blog: I did in fact go down to London town this weekend. This is what I would call a report on the funtimes I had.

Origins

My Dad decided (on a whim, it would seem) to take part in this year's London to Brighton Cycle, which is 54 miles long.

Which I'm sure he enjoyed immensely. We recruited another family, the Evans/Wood tribe, to provide some company on the trip. Just Martin, mind.
This left me, my sister Louise, my mom, Martin's wife Carol and Carol's son Nick with a weekend to plan!

The Plan

Saturday morning - leave Solihull and drive down to London
Saturday - London. Shopping. Of course.
Saturday night - Overnight stay in Martin's brother's apartment.
Sunday morning - The boys leave for the start line. The rest of us leave for Brighton.
Sunday - Brighton.

Sunday was also my birthday :)

London

Let's face it, we're all London veterans by now...the usual touristy stuff was expensive and unneccessary, and we'd done Oxford Street. So we decided to centre our London jaunt around Convent Garden, which is possibly my favourite place on Earth. This is the main entrance:

Inside and outside this are mostly restaurants, which are heinously expensive (even for 'London prices') but very vibey...there's street performers all over the place and its busy. The day we went, there was this old Chinese man on some sort of wind instrument which was awesome. We didn't stick around there long though, there's shops to be had!
Anyway, the point I'm making about central London, is that its so very multi-vibey that I could just float there all day, people watching. If you want to get anywhere, or get anything done, its crap. But for the amiable tourist like me, it was great.
I get a kick out of being anonymous anyway.

Whilst I'm talking about London, I'm just going to mention the awesomeness that is the Tube system.

* Note - this is an empty Tube, which is a rare occurance. In fact, I'd say it had never happened before ever.

I'm going to take this opportunity to tell you that I LOVE THE TUBE. People find me weird. They think its ridiculous that I love such a dirty, busy, unreliable service, full of random hobos and scary people.

Firstly, I have love for random hobos.
But seriously, tubes are brilliant. My all-day ticket cost one pound, which got me from clapham, to bank, to holborn, to bank, to clapham and everywhere else I needed to go, and I never waited more than 5 minutes for a tube. I actually heard some girl complaining that she'd have to wait 8 minutes for her train - seriously, on a bus service that's like speed-service! I don't complain if I have to wait like, half an hour for a bus. But on a tube, you're on and off like magic.
On the way home (home being the Clapham place we stayed) there were these people with flowers in their hair, they smelt good.
I also quite enjoyed trying to get the 7 of us into a clearly full train compartment, that was fun.
So yeah, I like the tube.

Anyway, moving on to part 2:
Brighton


Isn't it pretty?

Sadly, we didn't get to spend much time in Brighton. Why?

TRAFFIC. I hate traffic. I spent 6 hours of my birthday in a car :( In fact...let's review:

Yeah, that was a fun birthday.
But hey, the weather was good.

Well...I hope you enjoyed that.

Muchloves,
Emma x