Wired and tired from jet lag and missing a whole nights sleep, we all managed to crash for about 6 hours last night. Which meant we were up at 4:30 am.

After slowly getting ready, we left in search of Coffee (Siri capitalized this, and I decided to leave it, as yes, coffee deserved a capital letter this morning). Following a much needed caffeine hit, we started walking. It turned out we were within a quarter of a mile of Kensington Gardens, a huge and beautiful park.

We proceeded in search of Big Ben, but got sidetracked with breakfast.

“Crumpets and marmite!” I exclaimed. “Full English breakfast,” said Chelsea and Jai, as we stopped at the first small cafe.

Before we found Big Ben we stumbled across Buckingham Palace. The flag was flying, which told us the King was in residence today. Which makes sense because there was a big to-do yesterday, the King opened parliament.

“So what is Big Ben,” said Jai.

“A clock,” I replied with a sly smile.

“What? We’re walking all this way to see a clock?”

“Well, it’s not just any ordinary clock you’ll see. And it is attached to the houses of Parliament.”

We attempted to tour Westminster Abbey, but all the tickets were sold out for the day.

At this point, we were all pretty exhausted and didn’t want to walk another 5 miles back to our apartment. So Chelsea suggested we take the tube.

Oh my, oh my! To the uninitiated, navigating the London Underground is a noisy, confusing, out of body experience.

The ‘kids’ are having adventures, as we speak, trying to rent electric bikes…technical difficulties with SIM cards/credit cards/accounts…all the accoutrements of today’s electronic world.

We are discovering that you can’t even get into a public restroom without a contactless credit card. It used to be, we called using a public restroom, spending a penny, because that’s all it cost. Now it costs the same as a 5 mile ride on the Underground railway.