May 14, 2025
Our second and last full day in London! So much we wanted to try and fit in. Ollie was up today before an exhausted Lenny. Fittingly for London he asked to start the first Harry Potter, the Sorcerers Stone or in the UK called the Philosophers Stone.
He watched until Lenny woke up and joined him as they had breakfast and the laundry continued. Then we paused the movie to make our way to a FedEx for some shipments home. We needed to make sure our suitcases are as light as could be for our first discount airline flight tomorrow on Ryanair. The shipping was uneventful and the tic tacs the boys got yesterday at Tesco were used as bribes to keep them in line.
I tried to explain Déjà vu to Ollie yesterday as I got it in the London apartment. This morning he asked me what the word was again and suggested that it was Konnichiwa, Hello in Japanese, before I could answer. Shortly after this he told me my legs were to hairy and suggested I shave them. He was really on a roll this morning.
We set out to try a new bakery before we headed to our sightseeing bus tour. We decided the bus would be the best way to see everything, even if from a distance, on our one final day. The bakery has some nice cheesy bread sticks, cinnamon twists, and a sausage roll. Then it was time to find the bus.
The bus we booked was the same company we did the tour on in Cape Town. The boys had flashbacks of melting on the second level of the bus in Cape Town but it was not nearly as hot in London. Even though it was quite warm for London in mid-May. I did forget to bring the boys headphones so we were stuck reinserting their crappy bus given earbuds a hundred times. I swear the next bus tour I will remember!
We drove past all the famous sites and only got off the bus once, at probably the least well known site The Graffiti Tunnel. It was something we could all see quickly and enjoy without a massive crowd in our way. There were a few bars/restaurants in tunnel and after a bathroom emergency we ended up at a place called Passyunk Avenue. It had an American Sports bar theme and the bar is very pro Philly. We found out there were a few locations in the London area. It was a taste of home and no one was as thrilled as Ollie to get a hot dog with ketchup, mustard, and raw onions. We played some pool and foosball before heading back to the bus to continue our loop of the city.
We drove past Big Ben, the London Eye, Tower Bridge, Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and probably more I am forgetting. The boys were mostly good considering how long we were on the busy. At the end they were listening to the audio in various languages that were not English.
We ended our bus tour by Hyde Park and rewarded them with ice pops called a Twister. Lenny made one of his better stick finds and pretended it was a cane or that he was Tiny Tim. Ollie of course joined in and eventually there was some mild injury and fight.
Before heading home we stopped at a few shops to get some clothes for items that had been worn out over the last two months. Kayleen handled the shopping while I entertained the whiny boys who wanted to go home and watch Harry Potter. A bathroom emergency forced us to sit outside at a cafe and have some lemonades. We have started to more sternly remind the boys that they need to tell us when the need for the bathroom is a 7 out of 10 instead of a 10 out of 10. Hopefully Lenny will stop screaming “POOP” in a panicked voice while in large crowds.
Kayleen met us and we finished our lemonades and headed home. I wanted to ride in a traditional London taxi so we hunted one down and got it. The boys loved it because of the backwards facing jump seats they got to sit in. The test taxi drives in London have to pass to get their license is intense, a multiyear effort. All the driver needed was the name of our road and he was off, no GPS!
Once we got back to our place the boys took a much overdue bath while Kayleen made pesto pasta for dinner. I started a small load of whites only laundry instead of the larger mixed color load which would come to be a mistake tomorrow. Then we finished the first Harry Potter before it was off to bed.
I went out to meet an old Saba coworker, Alex, who I had worked for with many years. He also no longer works at Saba and is spending the next few months in London so it was a nice chance to catch up with him. One of the things he told me about London is that there are foxes that live in the city which seemed insane to me. Shockingly enough on my walk back home one jumped out right in front of me! Sadly I was too shocked/slow to snap a photo of it…
