UK Adventure, Day 1 - Driving & Dover

Long ago, on July 29th, 1981, a newly 5-year-old girl crawled out of bed at like 4am to watch Charles and Diana get married. She collected all the books and magazines on the wedding, and all the books from when William and Harry were little. 30 years later, that little girl was living in Germany when it was announced that William was getting married. She had to go, there was no way around it. Luckily, she has a husband and daughter who love her very much, and agreed to accompany her on her trip. Her husband had a friend in Hereford, so they decided to make a holiday of it - watching the wedding in London, going to Hereford, heading over to Wales for a couple of days, and then going back to London to sightsee after some of the other wedding aficionados had gone home.

Now to the present. Since we were going all over, we decided we needed to drive. Plane tickets plus train tickets would be more expensive than driving, and we wouldn't have as much room for souvenirs. The only bad thing about driving to London from Germany is that it takes a really long time. We left home at 5am. According to the GPS, it would take 5 hours to get to Calais, where we were to catch our ferry at 12:05. We had to be there at 11:35. I figured an hour and a half was enough leeway. Near Brussles, the GPS told us that there was some serious traffic, and it would divert us. It took us up to Antwerp. There apparently aren't a lot of freeways near Antwerp, because we were driving through suburbs for most of it. It took us forever. We didn't get there until 12:05, right when our scheduled ferry was leaving. Luckily, the let us get on the 12:50 one no problem. A 5 hour trip took 7 hours. We were supposed to board at 12:20. I had to pee so badly. I had needed to for hours and hours, but up until the very end, I was hopeful that we would make our ferry, so I didn't want to stop. We didn't board until about 12:45. Thank goodness we had paid for priority boarding, because we were among the first people to board.

After using the restroom, we headed to the food court for some lunch. It was OK. As we were eating, the boat started moving. There was horrible rattling and shuttering, it sounded like the boat was going to shake apart. That calmed down, and we were on the open sea. Then the rolling started. I had wanted to take the ferry so that I could 1) see the white cliffs of Dover, and 2) so I could go to Calais and feel like a Tudor. Little did I know just how Tudor my Channel crossing would be. I thought a huge ferry surely couldn't rock as much as a Tudor boat. I was wrong. I'm glad I didn't eat a large lunch, because it would have come back up. At first, it was kind of fun walking like a drunk person. Then it wasn't. I bought some Sea Bands, sat down, put on my headphones, turned my iPod to Vivaldi, and closed my eyes. It felt better. It was foggy and rainy, so we didn't have a great view of the cliffs. I was so disappointed. Not only was I sick, but I couldn't see the damn cliffs. Max and Em very kindly told me when they were in view, but I could only look for a couple minutes before I had to go back to my seat and my music. They took pictures for me. I just wanted to cry. Luckily, it went away almost immediately when we got off the boat. Thank God I booked the chunnel for the way back.

We had heard that Dover Castle was a good one, so we stopped in there. I'm so glad we did! They have all of the keep decorated as it would have been in medieval times. It was seriously cool.

We headed off to London. The whole place was decked out for the wedding. Flags everywhere, both regular Union Jacks and ones with Will & Kate in the middle. Driving in London wasn't as bad as my terror of last time had led me to believe. Of course, that could be because I wasn't the one driving this time. We made a few wrong turns, but the GPS sorted us out pretty quickly. Finding the hotel was pretty easy, finding parking not so much. Max dropped me off at the hotel so I could ask for directions. The concierge kindly gave them to me, luckily it wasn't *too* far away. We were staying at the London Paddington (woo hoo for loyalty points!) which you can enter from Paddington Station. The parking for for the station, but it was all the way on the other side. So, we could do the whole walk indoors, but it was a good 20 minute walk.

We checked into our hotel and headed out. We wanted to see the route and scout where we would go sit in the morning. We thought we'd head to the Hard Rock for dinner first, since it was pretty close to the Buckingham Palace end of the route, and Em really enjoys seeing Hard Rocks. She's been to several now. It was an hour wait, so we decided to just find something along the route. As soon as we got to the Mall (the park area in front of the Palace), it was packed with people. Tents lined the road down the middle. It was such a party atmosphere. We bought a couple of Will & Kate flags, and kept walking. It was less crowded once we passed the mall, but we headed down to the end of the route anyway. We didn't see a single place to eat. So, we headed back to the Hard Rock, since by now it was 10 pm, and we hoped the crowd had thinned out. It had. We sat right down. We had some dinner, and we all almost fell asleep in our food. We went back to the hotel for bed.

Emma says - The driving was probably the longest drive I've ever been on, but it wasn't the most boring, because I brought a lot of stuff. The ferry was cool because I got to watch Tom & Jerry. The castle was cool, because I finally got to run around after siting for hours and hours. The hotel was really pretty, and Dad told me that's how he rolls.