The Tower of London

Being tourists, we follow the tourist route, it is easy and there are interesting things to see. The pinnacle of London tourism and I dare say England tourism is the tower of London. A gigantic fortress on the river Thames that was super heavily fortified and ironically never attacked. However, it is seemingly the quintessential "castle" and a delight to visit.

In Reference to the Black Lung

Unbeknownst to us prior to our arrival in London, we quickly learned that the air quality of the city is still horrible. As we walked about our allergies began to flair, our lungs began to burn, and we could actually see the particulate matter floating in the air. I think we may have lost several years of our lives while staying there.

Dear London, Thank you for giving us the black lung, may your tubes run forever!

Why do we love Edinburgh? Besides its medieval grandeur and its majestic skyline, and certainly not to discount its almost rustic Scotch appeal, there is a certain magic about being able to walk to the bus station at 10:30 at night with the sun gleaming on your skin. Notwithstanding our love for Edinburgh after three days we decided that we would head down to London.





We arrived in London at 7:30am after a magical 10 hour bus ride. We headed straight for St. James park to take a nap. After almost getting run over by a lawnmower we decided to go to wait for some friends at our apartment. A few hours later we all got together and hit the Portabello Rd. market.




I will try and keep these posts more frequent so that we can put more pictures up. It takes so long to upload the pictures. Sorry for the wait.

Scotland, or, we have a unicorn on our family crest, may our name live on

Perhaps we belong in the UK, maybe it was meant to be, because we really have no problem that all the food is smothered in gravy. Delicious salty gravy.

Leave it to me to be impressed with the thing that everyone else pokes fun at. Let me just say that it is best that we don't live in the UK because I would eat this every day, it is cheap, abundant, and is highly in nutritious if you need to add more sodium, starch, and fat to your diet.

Besides the all too delicious fare, we have had a lovely time in Edinburgh. Truly a city that anyone could enjoy. The city is so majestically old and the skyline is incredible. The traditional cold, damp weather was trumped by a hot and humid air that made us smell as fresh as potato cellars.

I have been trying to upload these picture intermittently from free wireless hot-spot to free wireless hot-spot and have no idea what this blog is going to look like (my apologies).

UP UP and AWAY

Hello Everyone! Its me Chelsea, i have not yet written on this blog. This is my debut post, i hope it is enjoyable! On May 18th 2010 Rusty and I embarked on our trip to explore the world! Well at least we tried to. When we got to the airport after many hugs goodbye to my mom and tears shed (i am a very emotional girl, some say this is one of my best qualities, that i am able to cry at the drop of a hat) We find out that our flight is delayed 2 Hours! To my surprise we both were not that worried about it. We decided, while we were preparing for this trip, to not get stressed and mad when there is nothing we can do about the situation. Because our flight was delayed we were going to miss our connecting flight to Edinburgh. We had to get into another line to get another connecting flight. We sat in this line for 3 hours. yes 3. People were getting pretty irritable and some brit needed someone to yell at and that happened to be me and Rusty. We just looked at him and laughted, haha. You're in the wrong line mate no need to get mad at us! We finally get to the front of the line and 3 people cut in front of us and the ladies at the counter helped them!!! this is when i got irritated. It always astonishes me how rude and selfish people can be. Thinking they can cut in front of all these people! i said to one guy the line is back here, and he says: I know!! why did he get mad at me when he is the one cutting!! we learn this thing called waiting in line for your turn in preschool people!! Finally we get our turn and to our luck they can't book us a connecting flight, great! we stood in that line for nothing. By the time we got on our plane there were a lot of irritated people. Rusty and i just sat down, and tried to relax. Phew! 10hrs later we are in London and now we have to find a connecting flight, that was a lot easier than LAX craziness! We finally made it to Edinburgh and it was all worth it in my opinion, it is so pretty and green, and the people are so' lovely'- that is a word they use a lot here, i am going to insert it into my vocab. Feel free to do the same- Cheers!

Michael Jackson and me waiting in the 3 hr line

(he missed his flight)

Bikes, Books. & Tools!

Our alarm went off at 6:15am on Saturday, earlier than we normally get up. With some excitement we rolled out of bed thew on our clothing and went out into the crisp morning air. Much to our chagrin we were met outside by a grizzly looking man with a large truck. He shouted to me from his cab, "you got any Bikes, Books, or tools?" and thus began our epic garage sale 30 minutes before we were intending on starting.

Within an hour we had sold at least fifty percent of all the goods we owned. People came in droves buying everything we put out on the front lawn. Nice things, old things, and some just plain old fashioned junk; it was all free game.

It seemed as if we were selling everything for a dollar. People kept coming up to us with their arms full of our personal belongings; haggling for the lowest price possible. With the unrelenting influx of customers we could barely keep track of what was going and for how much. However, every time we pulled out our wads of cash to give change to people we would marvel at the ever growing stash of cold hard cash.

Our bed, TV, clothing, furniture, and everything else were snatched up by garage sale-ites. Before we knew it most everything had sold and by the end of the day we only had a small box of old clothing to give to charity. Our garage sale was a success! We sold everything we owned (for the most part) for about 800 dollars!

For now we are enjoying sleeping on a blow up mattress and eating on the living rrom floor. It has been liberating getting rid of all our stuff, but we wonder if we will feel the same when we don't have anything when we return from out trip.