Day 2 - London, England

buckingham palace
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We arrived safely in London at around 7:30am, surprisingly well rested. After frantically searching for our bags, we made our way to the "lost luggage" line. As we were trying to convince ourselves that the trip was about "winging it" and that everything would be fine, a flight attendant made his way to the counter carrying our two HUGE backpacks- apparantly they hand deliver the heavy bags.  We soon found out just how heavy our bags were; walking to the tube we realized we may have made a mistake in how much we packed- a total of 100 pounds together! On the tube (traveling to Victoria station in central London) we met a delightful investment banker from Berlin. We also met a nice woman originally from India and now working in London. We got caught up in our chats with new friends and almost missed our stop. Grabbing all of our many bags and trying to maneuver off the tube, we had our frist casualty of the trip- Shaun left his baseball hat on the tube (we both loved that hat, RIP adidas). Once we got to Victoria station we dropped off our bags in storage lockers and began to explore London!

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Our first stop was Buckingham Palace. As we approached the palace we saw some sort of a commotion- there was some sort of parade with uniformed flutists and all of the guards on horseback! What a way to begin our trip! After taking many pictures (which will be uploaded shortly), we walked along St. James park. St. James park lead us to Westminster Abbey, St. Margaret´s Church, Big Ben, and the House of Parliament. We traveled down Whitehall street where I saw my first English telephone booth. Whitehall lead us to Trafalgar square which is home to the only trashcan in London where I finally disposed of the coffee cup I purchased at 9am. Soon after the trashcan spotting we stopped to have lunch in a cute Thai restaurant. We then jumped on the tube again to see the Monument (which is spectacularly huge), saw the London bridge, traveled down the Thames River, and visited the Tower of London. After the Tower we jumped on the tube and headed back to Victoria station. We grabbed our bags and jumped on a surprisingly comfortable coach bus to Stensted airport for our easyJet flight to Barcelona. Our flight was delayed for 3 hours for "equipment failure" which seemed to be a popular cause for delay that afternoon- 5 other easyJet flights were also delayed...by the way there was a fire in the airport 3 hours before we got there...we were very excited to be flying with easyJet.

st. margarets
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By the time we finally arrived in Barcelona all of the trains to central Barcelona were no longer running. We hopped on the shuttle bus we saw everyone else piling into. About five minutes into the trip one of our bags feel off the top cabin almost hitting about 3 people standing by. Even worse was that the driver made no announcements as to where the bus was stopping, we don´t speak Spanish, left the map of Barcelona Aunt Jane gave me at home, and have NO CLUE where we are going. So, we did what any responsible American would do- we followed the biggest crowd off at a random stop in Barcelona. Good news is it was the right stop; bad news is that we didn´t realize it was the right stop. We walked, and walked, and walked with our wonderful backpacks.

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After walking for about 35 minutes I started to freak out. Shaun, as always, kept his calm as we walked down Barcelona allies at about 1:00am with our backpacks and very little directional sense. We rejoiced when we ran into two police officers who gave us directions and advised us to make sure we watched our bags so they weren´t stolen. Needless to say, my freaking out hit an all time high (Shaun apparantly had the same expereince, though he only shared it with me once we were safe in our hostel room.) We hailed a cab and arrived at our hostel at around 2:30am. Day One is finally over and we´re excited to explore Barcelona tomorrow without backpacks.