London In A Day

Hello from London!

Today was an absolute whirlwind of "high speed tourism," as we now affectionately refer to it. We managed to tour a pretty good chunk of this enormous city in the span of about 12 hours. Here's a quick recap!

Our flight from Nairobi to Heathrow left around 11:30 last night, and we arrived in London just after 6:00 this morning. The original plan was to stay at a hostel tonight, but Josh remembered that an old friend of his, Kenny, lives in London with his wife, Abi. Josh was able to contact them, and they graciously allowed us to not only leave our luggage at their flat while we toured the city, but also spend the night with them tonight! There have been quite a few unexpected expenses on this trip, so we've been trying to cut costs wherever possible. Having Kenny and Abi open their home to us, especially on such short notice, was a huge blessing!

Arriving at their flat, we consulted with Kenny and Abi on which areas of the city to visit and how best to get there. The trickiest part about London is just figuring out the easiest and/or quickest way to get from place to place. After putting together a game plan, we hit the town. Below are a few of the places we saw and things we did:

Stood on the Prime Meridian (aka: the beginning of time)
Boat ride down the Thames
Big Ben
Parliament
Westminster Abbey
Buckingham Palace
British Museum
Sherlock Holmes Museum
Arsenal Stadium
Hyde Park
Kensington Gardens

After an incredibly fun but exhausting day, we grabbed dinner at a cozy pub downtown and started making our way back to Kenny and Abi's home. Unfortunately, about halfway there, one of our connecting subway rides was not scheduled to make its next stop until after midnight. At the airport this morning, we had all purchased day passes for bus and rail transportation, but the passes expired at midnight. It was cold, dark, and rainy, so we weren't about to walk anywhere. Thankfully, Abi was able to pick us up in her little Volkswagen car, and we managed to cram 9 people into a 5-seat car for the ride home.

Well, it's almost 2:00am here, so I'll close for now. Our flight to Orlando leaves tomorrow morning around 11:30am. We'll be flying out of Gatwick. Thank you all for your continued prayers! Everyone is exhausted, but otherwise healthy.

Good night, and we'll see you soon!

David

P.S. We finally have internet that's fast enough to upload pictures (see below). We'll be uploading some for our previous blog posts soon!