We boarded the bus to the Avis car hire company, which was extremely well organised. Although we did have to leave the warmth of the airport. It was a bit like that Jamaican bob sled movie “Cool Runnings” as the door opened outside, we quickly stopped and donned as many layers as we had to hand. Scott’s words for the next while involved “oh my god it is cold and various other words for freezing”. On the bus to the car hire depot we did not see much snow, a few piles here are there, but nothing we had imagined after seeing the news reports of the last few days. Our car (Nissan Note) was ready at Avis, but there was no GPS, so we stood our ground as my booking stated I had booked a GPS. So after some fuss, we managed to get a portable one without a charger cable, so we had to plug it into the laptop which was charged, talk about electronics taking over your life. We headed outside to the car, loaded up, scraped the ice off the windscreen and headed into central London.
There weren’t many cars on the road, so it was nice drive with some of the sites looking very eerie in the morning gloom – not having any sun was throwing off Scott’s natural ability to navigate (don’t worry people, I didn’t take over). The Tom Tom didn’t particularly like being in central London as it made us go around the block many times, before we finally found Robert & Kevin’s house. Unfortunately we had to get their neighbour out of bed as she had the spare key, but by 8:30am we were in the most wonderful apartment, warm and toasty having a coffee and Scott having vegemite on toast. Life can sometimes just be perfect J
Robert and Kevin are up in Newcastle with the family, we are are left to our devices and decide to potter around for a bit, watch some tv, read the paper before getting rugged up and heading out into the cold and quickly found our way down to the Thames and doing some sightseeing and walking up towards Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.
We passed a lot of the bicycle hire stations similar to Paris. Which seem like a really good idea, particularly with the amount of bus lanes, however, I am sure it is totally different when people start coming back into London to work and there are crowds everywhere. Of course in this temperature I can’t think of anything worse than wind blowing down my jacket.
After a couple of hours wandering the streets and taking photos, looking in shop windows etc, we headed back to the apartment. Scott was very happy with the state of affairs around Robert & Kevin’s house as it was surrounded by pubs and Indian curry restaurants – at this rate we may never leave J.
Robert & Kevin had supplied everything for our fantastic Christmas day lunch. We had planned to head back outside for another walk, but it was so cold and we were so toasty, we decided to treat ourselves to an afternoon chilling out on the couch with a glass of wine and some tv.
