up the cruise at the docking area near Big Ben and took it to the Tower of London. It wasnice to go under the many bridges and see the sights from the river.We didn’t use the Underground (Tube), because we wanted to see the city as wewalked around, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be that confusing. My wife and I used the Metro(subway) in Paris, and that was pretty easy. So, if you want to go many places in one day,and you don’t want to do the Original Tours bus tour, I think the Tube has one-day passesthat would definitely be worth it. We were going to one or the other, but settled on the bus tour because we could sit down for an extended period of time and have someone tellus about the sights. However, towards the end (the busses don’t run all day) the Londontraffic was getting heavy, so we were tied up a little bit to get to the last stop (they don’tallow you to get off early before the stop, even though many people were asking to getoff).
DAY 1 / 2 REGRETS:
If I would do Day 1 / 2 again, I would add a day or two before the “start” of the trip so that you have more time in London, other than just gettingthere on Day 2 and have the remainder of a jet-lagged day in the city. You can requestthat through whomever you book your Cosmos tour. There’s so much to do in London,and would definitely like to return to visit the numerous sites.So we maximized our time in London as much as we could without being overlytired. We were also very hungry and thirsty as we were walking around, but we couldn’t buy anything from a vendor because we didn’t have any U.K. currency (we grabbed plenty of Euros before we left, but no pounds), and all the banks and exchange placeswere closed on a late Sunday afternoon/evening. So I would recommend bringing some pounds from the airport or from your U.S. bank before you fly over to London. We hadto wait to go to a restaurant later in the day to charge our meal and beverages.
CREDIT CARDS:
Check your credit card company if they charge a conversionfee for the currency, and maybe ask if they could waive it because you’ll be Europe for awhile and you’ll be using their card exclusively (and a lot!). We used Capital One, andthey do not charge anything extra to convert currency; just trying to save you a couple of extra bucks.
Day 3, Monday, June 16, 2008LONDON-BRUSSELS, BELGIUMBREAKFAST:
We had to wake up at 6am because to pack the luggage onto the bus, we needed our large luggage outside of our hotel room doors by 6:45am. We wentdown to breakfast, which was the ultimate and best part of the hotel. It was the best breakfast we had on our entire trip, but we didn’t know it at the time. Luckily, we ate alot. They had scrambled eggs, sausages, cereal, lunchmeat, cheeses, variety of fruit,yogurt, waffles, bread/toast, muffins, bagels, and much more.
TRIP TO DOVER / CALAIS:
After filling ourselves, we went to the tour coachthat left in front of the hotel at 8:30am, heading for the port of Dover, England to take aferry over to Calais, France and then a bus to Brussels, Belgium. We had to switchcoaches at a rest stop, because our driver broke off the passenger side mirror on a streetsign in London. We weren’t delayed too much, it was actually quite funny. The driver had a few passengers help him hold the mirror in place while he used electrical tape tofasten it to the bus. Such an adventure!
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