Day 1 in London

So, Goosie, Mark and I made it back to sleep around 3:30 and slept until about 7:30.  Not too bad...Our plan was to go to the Hyde Park ward until we realized the girls were out cold still at about 9:00 when the ward starts.  We decided not to let them sleep later than 10:00, but they were hurtin' when we woke them up!  We made a plan to go to Greenwich and take a boat trip down the Thames, but as we arrived at the tube station, Lu threw up - a lot -  all over the ground the waiting for the train.    Poor Lu, poor people who had to clean it up...yikes.  Change of plans.

Mark took Lu home and I took the rest of the girls to the Victoria and Albert Museum.  They love using their new Oyster cards for the tube, and it's fun to watch them learn a new system in a new city.  At the "V&A" we saw the costume exhibit that traced dress through the last several centuries, and the  girls liked seeing the different hoop skirted dresses and men's wigs.  We also watched a short film on how bronze casts are made - I have always wondered!  We saw casts of Trajan's columns and the David, among other cool things.  When Gooose got restless, I gave her one of the suckers I brought along for just such moments, and it worked like a charm.  Outside the museum were some cool chalk drawings and one of the neat old red telephone booths, so we took pictures and played around those.  The random, unexpected exploring things like those are some of my favorite things to do.

By then it was lunch time, and miraculously, Lu was feeling well!  So she and Mark met up with us in a fun street surrounded by cafes where we got a great lunch.  I asked Goose what she wanted for lunch and she said "soup that you dip bread in," so that's what we got :). (So awesome). Of course, she also loved chasing pigeons in this plaza.  She is totally reminding me of Peel who was only about a year older when she came to Costa Rica with us, and was such a happy, cute traveler.

After lunch, we went to a butterfly house at the Natural History Museum.  It's always entertaining to see zelle around butterflies - they freak her out, which is hilarious, of all the things to be freaked out by, but she has always hated them.  Weird, funny girl.  Inside the NH museum, we saw the requisite stuffed mammals, bugs, and rocks.  Cool building and fun place.  We loved it.  Or last stop of the day was a short walk past the lds Hyde park building (which is sort of strange with the super tall, narrow steeple, I have to say) up to the Royal Albert Hall and Prince Albert Memorial.  It was fun to walk through the fancy neighborhood on the way there and see these cool sights.  I'm glad we'd seen Young Victoria before this, too.

On our way home, we got waffles and creeps for dinner, and made it back in time to work on trip journals.  The girls love having a place to put all thief brochures, postcards and tickets, and it gets them to write a w things down each day.  So, what started out a little rough turned out to be a great first full day in London! So glad things turned out this way.  It could have been much worse.