London One, Day One

We didn't find a house in time to plan a Christmas trip out of the country, but we still wanted to get out of town for at least a few days, so we opted for London. Rather than haul all of Christmas onto the Tube (the London Underground train) and through the streets of London to our hotel, we planned a several day excursion with a return home on Christmas Eve.

We have heard that driving in London should be avoided, so we drove to the closest Tube stop to our home (about an hour away) and hopped on the next train into town. It took a little under an hour, and we emerged from underground right across the street from our hotel. How's that for planning?

It was late enough--after the hour it took us to get into our hotel room--that we decided to find a close restaurant for dinner and make it an early night. (Little kids cause you to plan sanity-saving time.) We found an Italian restaurant just down the street (first Italian restaurant since we've arrived in the UK. How I have survived, not sure.) and enjoyed some tasty authentic Italian food. Hailey enjoyed the most expensive dish of spaghetti noodles in her life. It was eight pounds sterling which is currently equivalent to $12.43. The practical part of me calculates how many boxes of the same noodles I could buy at the grocery store for that amount. The too-tired-to-care, vacationing mama part of me decides not to care. I chose to focus on the fact that my food was delicious and that the staff was being extra nice to my daughter who was out to dinner after eight o'clock at night.

On the way back to our hotel room, Hailey and I wandered into one of the gift shops. I saw this poster and asked the store clerk about it.

He told me that it was a poster produced by the British government at the beginning of World War II to raise the morale of the public. It was never used. It was rediscovered in a second-hand bookstore about ten years ago. The crown featured is a symbolic crown of King George VI. And now you know.