Summer Vacation 2016 London Day 1

Hey guys,

Today’s blog post is about our flight to London and our first day in London. I decided to combine the two because our flight was so late in the evening that it was basically already the next day anyways. We flew out of Miami International Airport, which was about a 3 hour drive from where we live because it’s directly across on the other side of the state.

We had a direct flight from Miami to London Heathrow, which is exactly what we wanted. My mom and sister don’t particularly enjoy flying so it’s a lot easier to just take one long flight rather than having to take a couple shorter ones. Our boarding time was supposed to be 8:30 pm and I believe we were supposed to take off at 9:45 pm. However, they needed to update the computer software on the plane so we didn’t end up boarding until around 9:15 pm and then our flight probably didn’t take off until 10:30 pm.

For me personally, the flight over there was terrible because I unfortunately got stuck with a seat that did not move at all and I was stuck the upright position the whole time. So I had a very hard time sleeping. Thankfully I did have the window seat so I was sort of able to lean against the wall and sleep a little that way.  However, the movies that they featured on the plane were pretty nice. Most of them were new and popular.

Photo Credit: My sister Aimee

For our dinner, we were served two options, pasta with red sauce or chicken with rice. I had the chicken with rice when we went to Ireland and I did not like it at all so I chose the pasta with red sauce this time. It was pretty tasty but nothing special. We also got a small breakfast, which consisted of a blueberry muffin top, blueberry yogurt with granola pieces, and some trail mix packet (which I gave to my mom).

I don’t remember exactly what time we arrived in London but I believe it was around 11 am or possibly noon. Once we landed we grabbed our luggage and headed to the Heathrow express, which took us to Paddington Station. Paddington Station was only about a 10-15 minute drive from our hotel, which was really nice. We stayed in an extremely nice area and I will most likely do a hotel review once I am done blogging the rest of the trip.

After we checked into our hotel room we headed out into the city. One of the first things we wanted to do was get a better feel for the city. So we decided to do some shopping because there were several stores that I really wanted to check out. We headed to Piccadilly Circus because my sister had done some research online and found out that the area has a lot of shopping. We basically did a lot of walking in the area and checked out a couple different stores. 

We didn’t technically eat lunch because of the time we ate breakfast. So we ended up eating at around 3 pm in the afternoon, which I think was kind of strange for British people. The restaurant we went to, which was packed, only 2 tables were actually eating food. Everyone else was just coming in and ordering drinks. The restaurant we ate at was called Slug & Lettuce.

One of the stores we checked out was Primark, which we finally found right before it was about to close so I didn’t end up getting anything. However, my sister bought a couple things. We also checked out this store called Next which we each bought a few things from and then after that we headed to the Disney store and bought some souvenirs (I grew up and live in Florida, yes I’m a huge Disney fan).

After we finished shopping, we hailed a taxi and headed back to our hotel room and called it a night. We were very tired and really needed a lot of sleep!

Thanks for stopping by!

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XO, Steph