Crowne Plaza Hotel Gatwick-Crawley

... of art.This gallery truly explains the meaning of quality over quantity. The art housed in this gallery is truly spectacular. When I finally emerged, I was exhausted but I knew I was back in London. It was a spiritual day for me today - I spent it at St.Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey :) Took the obligatory pictures in front of the 1666 commemorative monument and as close 10 Downing Street as I could get.No.10 was not as spectacular as I thought it would be - it ...

... flight was not full so we had three seats to ourselves. All of a sudden we could see the lights of London. It was hard to comprehend. Here we were in ****ing London. Across the other side of the globe. Vietnam was instantly shoved into the back of out mind. It survives now only as a distant memory, a dusty old travel blog and a few silly photos involving piglets or Vin Pearl Land. We walked off the plane and whadaya know, it was well cold. Because Vietnam and Bangkok were hot ...

... and monkey nuts to give to any squirrels me might happen upon in our travels! (no we don't pack anything for the homeless, they are not as cute as the squirrels!!) We started by taking pics of our snotty-sleepy-fluey selves on the train en route to St James park (as seen on FB!) getting to the park, I am amazed at how beautiful it looks in the weak sun over UK. the only thing to have a laugh over are all the ...

... shown. Our 70-something tour guide took us first to the Rosetta Stone, and I was in awe standing before an artefact I'd heard so much about. For over 1000 years, nobody knew how to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs, until the deciphering in 1822 of this document, written in Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphic scripts.<br><br><br><br>We were next shown the Elgin Marbles, now called the Parthanon Marbles, which were on the Acropolis in Athens. The museum building itself was ...

... areas of the UK: Midlands, Scotland, London, Southeast, Northwest, etc. and then an area for Belgium, German and Czech Republic and oen for USA and Rest of the World. We took our time traveling to each area of the UK before spending the majority of the day in Germany and Belgium. Obviously. The end of the day is hazy but we did keep good records of the beers we tasted. The top ones and their score out ...

Well a couple of weeks ago we decided to go down to London and as I had to work on Monday and Tuesday we happen to have a hire car for the weekend so we decided to drive around while we didn't have to pay for a car. Ok so our flight left at 6:25am from Edinburgh, we got up and left home at 5:30 as we were already had our boarding passes and we had to just drop off 1 bag to go underneath. We arrived at the long-term car park at ...

... Notting Hill (had to give Gaynor something after Lords), which was all very pretty... That night we had our first moment of Australian cringe when we went out to dinner at a great Greek place where, we subsequently found out, th previous night 4 drunken Aussies from the local Walkabout had smashed the front window and assaulted the owner... I wonder how easy it is to become a Canadian citizen????? Yesterday morning we were off to St Pauls, which was very ...

... in dryer. At this point our clothes were only mildly damp, and we had spent a far portion of the morning in the Laundry mat, not enjoying the sights of London. So we gave up and hung all our clothes in our hotel room, chinese laundry style (this will be a recurring theme in our travels...). The first sight on our list of things today was the Tower of London. Despite our best efforts the scaffold alluded us. We did however see where ...

... grounds at Magdelen college are huge and beautiful. Oxford had/has the biggest parks that go on forever and downtown is fun with all the college age students. We came back from Oxford back to London to stay with Brad one more night. We ended up going to the Camden district of London to meet Mariiane's friend Rachel. We ended up as luck would have it in the only gay bar in all of northern London and had a blast. We had no idea until we ...

... later. After some Thai Chicken for lunch, I went through the British Museum. Well, a small portion of it anyway -- it's huge! I did the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek sections. Ran out of time for the rest, but it all looked interesting. Of course, the highlights were the Rosetta Stone and Elgin Marbles (no, not glass marbles like the game, but statues and friezes removed from the Parthenon in Athens around 1800), but there were ...