Day 3 - Day in the Museum

Today was entirely devoted to the British Museum, and what a day it was. We arrived at just on 10am and left at 5pm having seen every part of this incredible place. Seeing the Rosetta Stone was amazing, and something I've now ticked off my bucket list. Add to this the phenomenal treasures this museum houses, not without controversy I might add, and it was really a day of trying to absorb wonder after wonder. The Parthenon wing was both astonishingly beautiful and also problematic, as I've never been entirely convinced that these treasures belong here in London rather than the Acropolis, and the accompanying explanations are quite British in their take on the issue. In spite of this, the stunning presentation was epic and considered.

Other highlights included seeing Cleopatra, the head of Rameses, Mesopotamian cuneiform friezes, Viking jewellery,  Roman armour and the entirety of the King's Library Wing.

For dinner we went out to Hammersmith to a lovely pub for some Shepherd's pie and burgers, then we made our way back to our hotel. A brilliant way to spend our sixth anniversary in London :)

Day two - Westminster Abbey to Trafalgar Square

Today, after a great sleep, it was sightseeing galore. After breakfast at out beautiful hotel in Notting Hill, we made our way to Westminster Abbey and did the full tour, courtesy of Jeremy Irons' disembodied voice. It was a brilliant experience, and a surprisingly moving one; seeing Newton's memorial, amongst the many others, Poet's corner and the various chapels within the Abbey was surreal. The stunning architecture and history spanning more than a thousand years made this a very special place to visit.

We had a muffin and tea in the Abbey cafe, then made our way to St James' Park, stopping to watch the changing of the horse guard, then following the horses up the Mall to Buckingham Palace. Queenie wasn't allowing tours, so we busied ourselves taking photographs of the courtyard and guards. We visited her gallery at the rear of the palace, and bought a little corgi as a memento.

From the palace we stopped at The Bag O'Nails and had a fish platter and beer/Pimms for lunch, before making our way to Wellington's Arch, which we were delighted to find had a little museum and a lift inside! We went up and took the opportunity to look over the War Memorial and Hyde Park. The plan was to visit St James' Palace, but it was closed, so we traipsed through St James' park, down Regent Street, to Piccadilly Circus. It's a busy intersection, essentially, in the theatre district. We had a little wander around, bought tickets to Derren Brown for Wednesday, and then walked past Whitehall to the National Gallery, where we spent a couple of hours wandering about admiring the (mostly Dutch) paintings. Nelson'd Column was infested with drunk Santa's (we assumed there was a pub crawl) so we made our way back to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament along the Thames.

Back on the tube, we popped back to our room to see where the best curry in our area was, then made our way to Dunbar - a recommended Indian restaurant down the road from the hotel. It was there we had some of the best Indian food I've ever tasted. Tired and stuffed to the gills with Lassie and curry, we staggered back to out hotel to get some much needed rest. Now to organise tomorrow and sleep :)

United Kingdom 2015/16 - Flight in and Day One

My God, I don't think it's possible to feel more tired. We left home at 7.45am on the 10th of December, and I'm writing this at 3.55pm in London, meaning we've not rested in over 40hours. I have vertigo. However, we've had a fantastic start to our trip. As we arrived well before check in, rather than sit in the hotel, we're right next to the Portobello Rd markets, so we decided to see how much we could explore. They are fantastic - I've already bought four dresses, three scarves and a pair of boots, and we saw pretty much everything. The prices range from very cheap (10 pounds for a dress) to very expensive (850 pounds for an antique cane) and all manner of things in between. The markets are a delightful mix of established clothing and antique stores, hipster eateries, old pubs, bric a brack stalls, vintage clothing shops and stalls, fresh produce and street food.




We had some lovely pastries and coffee in Second Cup, and then Andrew had a pie, mash and mushy peas with gravy from the most British eatery I could imagine - white and green tiles, washing dishes behind the counter, with an owner who sounded like Rose's mum, whose son was in the back making the mash. Delightful :) We visited virtually every shop and stall, finding a beautiful stall specialising in movable type and printing press decorative stamps - needless to say, much time was spent perusing the beautiful items. A few observations so far include: We both keep giggling at the accents, we watch too much British television and, as a result, we associate certain accents with comedy, regardless of the content of the conversation. Dogs appear to be more welcome here, with many of them being allowed in shops, and most of them are in jackets. Finally, where we're staying is both beautiful and insanely well-off, we counted no less than four Porches, one Aston, numerous Range Rovers and one Rolls Royce in less than 100m.




I think we'll go back to Portobello Rd tonight for tea, but right now it's time to have at least and hour or two of sleep as we're both virtually delirious at this point. We'll try to keep everyone updated here on the blog :)

- Jess





We didn't go back out. We just slept from 3pm until 7:33 am.



- Andrew

The last day

We woke up early enough to go and make some waffles for breakfast, before doing the final pack and heading into LA. We stopped off at the Citadel – a giant outlet mall – in the hope of getting one last cheap pair of runners, but we didn't find anything that appealed so we continued on into Hollywood. We drove the streets of Beverley Hills for a little while, admiring the homes, then found a park off of Hollywood Boulevard near the Chinese Theatre. We took some photos of the Hollywood walk of fame, did some souvenir shopping, and decided that our last meal in the USA would be at the Hard Rock Cafe. We had burgers with fries and a peach cobbler for dessert, and then it was time to leave.

Our last drive in the Mustang was the 40 minute journey to LAX and, after taking some final shots of the car, we were headed through the delights of TSA enforced customs at the busiest airport in the world. It wasn't too bad, but we always forget that you need to essentially disrobe for their scanners, but once we were through we were able to chill out and wait for our flight. The flight itself was 12 and a half hours of turbulence, some of which was quite violent, so I didn't get much sleep on the way to Auckland. We only had a brief wait there before getting on the last plane of the journey and, four hours later, we touched down in Adelaide and we were home. Our parents met us at the airport, and thus our epic adventure in North America came to an end. We had a magnificent time, made hundreds of new memories and experienced some phenomenal moments that we'll never forget. Thanks for reading and we look forward to catching up with everyone in person soon :)   

We're really 12 years old

Saturday aka Disneyland day!

The tagline is 'the happiest place on earth' and it definitely must come close. We arrived at 9am and were greeted with the scrupulously well kept main street, leading to the original Sleeping Beauty castle. We did a circuit of the park on the train and from there the day was filled with magical, fun and exciting activities, including: Matterhorn, Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, Teacups, Roger Rabbit, Toad's Wild Ride, Jungle Adventure, Mark Twain, Winnie the Pooh and numerous other rides. We also visited every shop, saw a show, watched the fireworks, took over 500 photos, met some of the characters, and ate stupid amounts of food (including fairy floss, or as they call it, cotton candy). Andrew bought an Indiana Jones hat and sheriffs badge, plus a charm bracelet for my Christmas present, and I bought an Alice in Wonderland tea plunger and a photo. We left the park at midnight, so in the end our day was 15 hours of joyful fun :)

Sunday – Universal Studios

As the title says, today was our day at Universal Studios and it was fantastic. Like yesterday, we had perfect weather, sunny and 20 degrees, plus it seemed that for most of the day there was no-one really there! It's amazing how much you can see and do when there aren't any lines for anything. We only had to wait ten minutes once, for the Simpsons ride, everything else we just walked straight to the front. This meant that we saw absolutely everything, went on all the rides, saw four shows, plus we had the tour, had lunch and did shopping. We arrived at 9.30am and we'd seen everything by 4.30pm, in part because there aren't that many rides and it's much smaller than Disneyland, though it's still a lot of fun.

We then decided to have a brief look at Hollywood, so we drove into the city and saw Rodeo Drive, Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills (from the open car) but, since we'd had very little sleep, we figured that some Chinese take out and the Golden Globes in our room was a fitting (and necessary) last night as we were stuffed. Tina Fey and Amy Pohler were hilarious, the food was fine and so ended our last evening in the United States of America. It's been a truly incredible trip and, with only a few hours in LA tomorrow, we only wish it could have gone for longer. We'll be leaving tomorrow (Monday) and we'll be home on Wednesday. See ya later, y'all! :)

Driving Big Sur

Friday

This day will be forever known as 'the most epic drive ever on Big Sur'. Big Sur is a 140 km stretch of road that follows the coast of California along the shores, cliffs, forests and farmland and is widely regarded as the most remote and inaccessible part of the country due to the fact that, once you're on it, there's no way to get off of it. It's a drivers paradise, with every turn giving yet another phenomenal vista that rival's anything we've ever seen. Our day was really around ten hours of driving punctuated with a lovely lunch in the middle of Big Sur at a local organic bakery where we had the most delicious custard filled doughnut ever. Throughout the drive we saw many eagles and vultures and, the best bit, ELEPHANT SEALS!

There's a whole part of the coastline that thousands of elephant seals have chosen to reside on whilst they breed and, as it turns out, it's pupping season now. As we were driving we realised the beaches looked odd because of the thousands of mammals lolling about on them, so we pulled over and had a delightful volunteer explain what we were seeing, as well as pointing out that some of them were less than two days old. Needless to say, I was thrilled. We continued the drive and tried (somewhat successfully) to take some photos of the surf and views.

After a very long day in the car we eventually found our way to our delightful little hotel a short stroll from Disneyland and, as we were unloading our luggage, the Disneyland fireworks began, which we could see perfectly from our stairs :) We settled in, went and got a late tea, and went back to our hotel for some much needed rest as we were exhausted.

I'm only borrowing your humvee

Thursday

Today we made a early start and headed to Muir Woods, the giant redwood forest just north of San Francisco. This was an amazing way to begin our day! These trees grow to be over 115m high and live for thousands of years. We had breakfast at the small cafe there before going on a short 4km 'hike' (wander) through this beautiful forest and we were lucky enough to see a woodpecker as well as a few other types of lovely birds that I didn't recognise. We were in the reserve for around two and a half hours, following which we needed some lunch so we drove back through the hills, stopping at a few viewing sites to get photos of the Golden Gate bridge on the way. We were exceptionally lucky with the weather so we decided to make the most of the rest of our delightfully sunny day.

With the roof down and being in the most ridiculous driving city, Andrew decided that we needed to stretch the car on one of San Fran's most famous and ludicrous streets; Lombard avenue. It's an insanely steep, heavily zig-zagged one way road down a very well kept street of gardens, which then rises steeply up to a lookout over the bay. I filmed it over the top of the windscreen – hopefully that turns out, because it was totally and utterly unlike anything else in the world.

We decided to see more of the city and pick up some carry on luggage to try and alleviate some of the strain on our very full bags, so we went into Chinatown and bought some cheap bags, dropped those back to our room, and went down to Union square for some our last shopping opportunity. We found another Uniqlo (yay) so we bought a few last items, looked into numerous other shops, and suddenly it was dinner time. The Golden Gate Grill seemed like a good and fitting end to San Fran. Giant hamburgers and assorted ribs, with chips and crème brulee to end, and we were done. Heading back to our hotel, we lamented that we only had two full days in such a wonderful city. Time to get ready for more epic driving tomorrow.