Grandma: Epic Day 1

The key for the first day of anyone's visit to Europe is to STAY AWAKE. You must make it through as much of the first day as possible, without sleeping, in order to speed up the acclamation to the time change. My mom arrived early in the morning on December 8th. I took the tube to Heathrow to meet her. Her flight was due to arrive early, so as a dutiful daughter, I also arrived early. Unbeknownst to me, her plane then sat waiting for a gate for 30 minutes and then there was a huge line at passport control. Luckily my mom appeared just as I was beginning to panic that something terrible had happened. We had an uneventful tube ride back and then she arrived at our apartment. The boys put her to work right away.

After a delicious breakfast, we walked her down through London to Westminster Abbey. We had saved a few key sites for her visit, and this was top of the list! We stopped in Trafalgar square to admire the menorah (it was hanukkah), the freaky people pretending to be statues, and the lions supposed created from Napoleon's canons. Unfortunately, this girl would not leave the lions alone and decided to climb up to be with one of them. She failed to climb up, but she succeeded in photobombing our picture since I was too impatient to wait for her to succeed/fail in her climb.

We made it down to Westminster, which is right near Big Ben.

There is also a park there with notable people in world history. We ate lunch with Gandhi.

And we admired the juxtaposition of Big Ben and the Shard in the beautiful clear sunny London sky! The boys love spotting the London Eye as well (not pictured here).

We then made our way into Westminster Abbey, which is imposing from the front.

You can't take pictures inside, so we don't have images of what we saw. But we all got audio guides and enjoyed seeing the beautiful building as well as the graves/memorial plaques for all the people buried there, including: many kings and queens and their relatives; Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton; Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Laurence Olivier, George Frederick Handel, and so many more. In the courtyard just outside the abbey (where it was easier to sneak a picture), we saw a few especially cool memorials:

Edmund Halley

Captain James Cook

It was quite a magnificent tour, and the kids did pretty well (Lanna slept through about half, which was helpful). 

We then walked over to see the changing of the horse guards (who were shockingly large).

And finished off the day with a home cooked meal and some chocolate pudding. Joey's goal was to see how big of a pudding bite he could fit in his mouth. This endeavour created some entertaining facial features.

The day was a rousing success! Mom was awake until at least 8 PM and managed to sleep through most of the night.