Mediterranean cruise and European adventure - Day 2 - London and Barcelona

London and travel to Barcelona

I woke up at 4:30 AM. Um, body? I don’t need to go to a workout this morning. I tried to go back to sleep, but it never happened. I just sort of rested instead. Everyone else was able to sleep until a more reasonable hour. After we ate breakfast in our hotel (which was actually a decent spread of food for only £10.50 for adults and free for kids) we checked out, handed them our baggage and returned to Victoria Station to take the tube to the Tower of London. By this point we were experts and thank goodness because it was rush hour and the number of people was insane. We weren’t able to get on the first train that came, but we did make it onto the second train. After a few stops, it thinned out and we were able to sit down, which was nice because I’m trying to save my foot as much as possible after breaking it seven weeks ago. It’s mostly okay, but it still aches a bit and does a weird thing where if I move it a certain way, the bone fragment that cracked off will get into a weird position and hurt until I get it popped back in (lovely image, I know). 

I didn’t really talk about why we were in London in advance of our Mediterranean cruise. When checking out airfare, it was really insanely, ridiculously expensive to fly to Barcelona one way and then back home from Rome one way. We looked at round trips into either Barcelona or Rome and those were cheaper, but not by very much. They also had a lot of stops. I couldn’t get a good flight into Barcelona without making either two stops or having really long layovers, usually in London. Then Norwegian announced nonstop service from Austin to London starting in March and I looked into it. Their prices were really really good. But then with their partners, we were looking at another really long layover in London because the flight to Barcelona wouldn’t be until 4:25 PM. Ultimately, we decided that splitting the travel into two days and not spending 7 hours sitting in the London airport would be better for our sanity and overall adjustment to the time change. At the end of the trip, I was really happy with how we arranged it. We loved our time in London and it really did make the travel overall so much nicer to just have one long non-stop for the transatlantic portion of our flying. I mentioned we sprung for Premiere class and it was about the same as the round trips we were looking at on British Airways to/from Barcelona. We perhaps ended up spending more money with the overnight hotel, food and transportation, but like I said, we had a lot of fun in London so I call it a win. 

Back to our story! We arrived this drizzly morning to the Tower of London somewhat earlier than anticipated because I had given us a lot of time to get over there in case of difficulties with public transit. Since the weather was cool and windy with a slight bit of drizzle so we waited inside Starbucks when Emmaline noticed that people were lining up so we went over to get in line. At precisely 9 AM (and not a moment earlier) they began letting people inside and we went straight for the crown jewels (with just about everyone else). It was so great being there early without giant crowds. When we arrived, the jewel guards were in the middle of some kind of pomp - I guess setting up for the day. That was fun to watch and we were able to spend quite a bit of time in with the jewels there really getting a good look at everything. (Sorry, no photos of the jewels - it's not allowed!) 

We spent quite a bit of time total at the Tower of London. Emmaline wanted to look at every since thing and read all the information about. She loved it and was completely entranced. She ended up buying a sticker book about the British monarchy that actually has quite a bit of history in it. She’s mostly read it so far and only done a few of the sticker activities. She’s always been interested in history and people, gravitating towards biographies when we visit the library. Roger and I, on the other hand, were getting tired and hungry so we pried Emmaline out of there and took the tube back, stopping at a café called Giraffe on our way back to the hotel. This one was a winner and everyone enjoyed their lunch quite a bit. Hooray! 

Back at the hotel, we grabbed our luggage and turned back around again to Victoria station to take the train back to Gatwick for our flight to Barcelona. Our flight to Barcelona was mostly uneventful except for the three bros behind us having some kind of party the whole time. They were completely aggravating and boisterous the entire flight. Upon landing, when these 30-something blokes ran at full tilt toward baggage claim, I turned to a guy who had been near us on our flight and said, “and people think Americans are loud and vulgar…” His response was, “I apologize on behalf of the British people.” We smiled at each other with a little chuckle. I guess there are idiots all around the globe. 

In Barcelona, since we didn’t have EU passports, we had to go through passport control and, much to Emmaline’s delight, earned another stamp. Then we picked up our baggage and made our way to the Aerobus service I had booked. We boarded the bus and it left just a few minutes later. The journey wasn’t too long and we got off and found our hotel fairly easily (only one wrong turn). We had already eaten a surprisingly tasty and fairly cheap dinner on the plane so we didn’t need to search for food and it was fairly late by this time so Emmaline got into bed while Roger and I organized our things for the next day until we too made our way to bed.

Click here for Day 3.