London - Thanksgiving 2009 (day 1)

We decided to take our first trip into London Thanksgiving weekend.  Since we're usually at the ocean in Bodega Bay for Thanksgiving, we talked about maybe hitting a coastal town this year too, but we all decided London was where we'd rather go.  So with about 30 places to see on our itinerary (ha!), we drove to the train station in Bicester (where we now live) Thursday morning and caught the train to London! 

 The train ride only took about an hour, wahoo!  The line ends at Marylebone, and we could have taken the Underground to our hotel, but we thought with our luggage it was worth it to grab a cab.  So glad we did!  For about £7 we zipped over to our hotel in Maida Vale.  Here's pictures of us in the cab - see I'm riding backwards with the driver's head behind mine?

So we got to the hotel and got settled, and I knew the kids would want to unwind a bit, so we ordered room service lunch and then headed down to the pool.  The pool was quite far from our room, and Scott forgot to pack swim trunks in his luggage from home, so we only went the one time.  The kids had a ball though, swimming for a couple hours.  

Scott and I thought we'd get dressed and maybe take the Underground (the tube) somewhere fun for dinner, but we had two reluctant little girls on our hands who only wanted to stay in the hotel, so we compromised by just walking a couple blocks down to a fish/kebab shop.  Then straight back to the hotel, where I pretty much laid it out that we were not going to spend our entire trip in the room, so they should get used to the idea.  At least I brought some wine so Scott and I had a couple glasses while the kids watched tv.   Sheesh.