We made it to London!

So far, I’ve put my groceries in a trolley, I’ve bought some room temperature eggs, transitioned my baby from diapers to nappies, and driven a people carrier (minivan) on the left side of the road, my first time ever driving a car with the steering wheel on the right. I’m also washing my clothes right now with some fabric conditioner.

We have been dealing with some pretty strong jet lag. Last night, we all woke up around midnight. Everybody was wide awake, so we went to the 24-hour Tesco to get some groceries. I’m sure the workers there were wondering why on earth we’d take our small children to the store at 1:30AM, but whatever.

Its raining here, which is fine. But ya know, we’re from Colorado, so we’re afraid to get wet. Go out in the rain? REALLY???? How do you even open an umbrella????? The good news is, Addie’s hair is 10X curlier already.

All our stuff is stored in Josh’s mom’s garage. Wowee we collected a bunch of stuff. This never would have fit in the camper…and the poor Tesla is in there too…all alone…missing us…

Addie’s school made chocolate cake for her last day. It was so sweet!

Henry saying bye to his teachers on his last day of school.

No words for this one 🙁

Ready to head to the airport

Checking out our ride to Iceland…then on to London

I thought it was 11.5 hrs on the plane…it was only 10! WOO HOO!

Middle of the night walk in London.

Warm eggs…they tasted the same though

 

Josh’s thoughts:

Moving out as always is difficult, it came down to the wire but we got everything packed, moved, cleaned, and ready. We were putting the finishing touches on the house about 10 minutes before the Limo arrived. Despite not having any furniture we had quite a few boxes and almost enough stuff to fill up a 17 foot moving truck… and this after moving out of a 345 square foot camper just nine months ago. Most of it was kids stuff: toys, mini picnic table, toys, bikes, wagons, more toys, kids books, and oh yeah, even more toys!

Divide et impera! Divide and conquer! While we’re not in Rome or Macedonia -yet- for that reference to make perfect sense, I figure it’s close enough, London is after all built from, and named after, a Roman settlement. Anyway, the three adults did a pretty good job of splitting things up, Brittany did the majority of the packing, Tiffany most of the cleaning, and I the moving. My mom was gracious enough to store our things in her garage and we used pretty much all of the available space.

The limo was really fun… and practical as far as we’re concerned. Brittany researched the transport options and even a large suburban would’ve been stretched to fit all of our luggage and the 6 of us travelers. With the limo we had MOOORE than enough space.

DIA was a breeze, though we did hog the check in counter for Iceland air for quite some time. The flight to Iceland was pretty smooth going as far as I’m concerned. The kids were a solid 8 out of 10, minimal crying, minimal wining, and no messes or accidents. WAY TO GO KIDS! The only real problems is that Addie didn’t really sleep for the first flight… she got maybe 30 minutes on the first leg of the flight and we had to wake her up in Iceland. Needless to say she was totally disoriented and unhappy. Bonnie took a while falling asleep and fussed quite a bit around that time, but otherwise she was a little joy. Henry played and slept well… his only problem is that he TALKS SO LOUD, jeeze Henry, how many times do we have to tell you, use your inside voice.

The airport in Iceland was extremely cramped, flooded with the first drop offs of the day, and we excited the plane out on the tarmac only to get on a shuttle that went so slow to the terminal that we could’ve got out and walked faster. We stood around for about an hour and got on the next plane. This leg was only 2 hours and 40 minutes and it went by in the blink of an eye. We were somehow lucky enough to have an empty seat in our row!

London Gatwick was huge and labyrinthine, we had to walk for what seemed like a good mile and make many turns before we got to the car rental. The man at the desk confirmed we’d rented a Manual People Carrier which is a van I guess. After we were all loaded up I got in the driver seat only to see three pedals on the floor and a shift stick on the left. I’ve driven plenty of manuals, but my brain was not making the connection to my left hand for shifting and driving on the left side of the road. Brittany heroically volunteered and drove us amazingly well to our house with me navigating. It must be that piano hand brain connection, she did so well!

That’s it for the trip! I’ll chime in soon with more thoughts and summaries!