Remember in the first post of this trip when I said my Mom wanted to come home on Sunday so she could go to work on Monday? This is mainly because she cray, but also because she is overly dedicated to her fourth and fifth grade minions (aka: students).

Well anyway. As luck would have it, flights to Seattle from any of the major European cities were about $200 more expensive on Sundays compared to Monday. Crazy, I know. But I had to oblige.

The cheapest returning tickets were from London, and though I didn’t have any major reason or desire to go to London on this trip (I mean, once you’ve been to the Harry Potter studio tour, what else is there??), I knew it would be strange to send my mom off on her own to the U.K. and just hope she would make it back to Seattle alive.

So that’s how the crew ended up in London for a day. Jonathan and I were staying one extra night, but this would be the last 25 hours of my mom’s trip!

We weren’t able to get our seats all next to each other, so my mom was on an aisle in row 19, and Jonathan and I were way back in the high twenties by the window. Oh. And I had to pee. So. Bad.

Just before security, I downed a gigantic bottled smoothie called a Froosh. Though I realize I haven’t mentioned them yet, I had become very nearly obsessed since seeing them in the Keflavik airport on that layover at the start of the trip. But everybody else was tired on our early morning taxi and bus ride to the Bergen airport (this ridiculous ten minute taxi ride cost me over $50!!!!!!!), so I was pretty much alone in chugging this giant smoothie.

And theeeeen, when in the airport security line, I realized I’d forgotten to dump my water bottle, so I had to chug that as well.

We were running a bit late (or so we thought), so there was no time to stop at the bathroom. My mom went while we stood in line for passport control, but after passport control, the bathroom at our gate was our of order! There was no going back. And of course our boarding was delayed. And then after we sat down in our seats and buckled up, our turn to hit the runway was pushed back for some reason.

I honestly can’t remember ever being so distressed from the lack of an easily accessible toilet. This was somehow worse than that time I was trapped on a water taxi in Venice, missed my stop, and considered jumping ship so I could relieve myself. (Should I have included a TMI warning at the start of this post??)

Anyway, I was no fun to Jonathan until we were in the air with the seatbelt sign turned off (a full hour after we passed passport security and I started wishing I’d peed long ago). I basically hurled over Jonathan and the poor guy on the aisle. I got to the bathrooms before the flight attendants were even finished unlocking them.

The rest of the plane ride was much less eventful, with the exception of this glorious sunrise on the wrong side of the plane:

Touchdown in London. End drama.

We then wasted a lot of time in Gatwick airport trying to figure out a plan for the day, and we didn’t even end up sticking to that plan. Whoops.

Our first stop was King’s Cross Station, where we accidentally bought a bunch of pastries and some English Breakfast tea for my mom.

Jonathan was shocked to find that this patisserie offered a version of his favorite strawberry Lagkagehuset treat.

Our main purpose here was to take pictures with the Platform 9 3/4 set-up, but my mom took one look at the line and decided it wasn’t worth it. Please enjoy this selfie with the platform in the background.

Okay. So that was our first deviation from the plan. After this, we were supposed to go get some Indian food in Camden Town, but I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant I wanted to find, so we ended up doing Chinese, instead.

At least it was tasty!

We did a little more exploring…

This guy created a drum kit using an upturned bike as the base!

Then on to the West End. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out which show to see, and the shows high on our list also happened to be high in price with minimal options for three seats next to each other. We even considered going to see Motown the Musical where we all had individual seats spread across the theater.

Luckily, we made the sensible decision to just buy our tickets at the box office instead of trying to mess around with internet sales and unreliable WiFi. Turned out that the tickets sold online had a little resale premium attached, so we saved some money there, and the awesome lady at the ticket booth gave us three seats near each other and then coached us on how to get people to move around so we could sit together.

Huzzah! My third show in London and my third time watching from the very last row. Theaters on the West End are smaller, so every seat in the house has a good view.

The show was a ton of fun! So many songs and lots of dancing (on both the part of the cast and the three of us). I also love learning from historical musicals. That’s why I loved Beautiful, the Carole King musical so much.

By the time we got it of the theater, as I’m sure you can see in the ‘after’ pictures, it was pitch black outside. It was only 5:30pm, but it definitely felt like it was past my bedtime.

We headed back to check out our Airbnb and to finally drop off or very full travel backpacks. We’d originally planned to drop them off at a left luggage facility, but it would have cost about thirty dollars for the three of us for the day, and that seemed like quite the rip-off.

Our Airbnb in London was a shoebox compared to our adorable gigs in Scandinavia, but what can you expect? This was our most expensive stay yet, and all we had to ourselves was a room with a single queen sized bed and a very uncomfortable sleeper futon with a tiny blanket for its covers.

We were all tired, but my mom really wanted to get fish n’ chips, so the two of us braved the dark British evening while Jonathan stayed back to lounge and sleep.

Now, do not take this sign lightly. It probably should have served as a bit of foreshadowing for us, because we certainly hit a few “humps” in the road. Ha.

We started out by getting on a bus going the wrong direction because I forgot that traffic moves the opposite way in the U.K. Whoops.

We were really enjoying the view from the front seat of the second level of the double-decker bus. That is, until we came to ‘the last stop’ and were asked to get off. It didn’t make any sense because we still hadn’t come to the stop we were meant to get off at.

And that’s when it hit me.

We slumped off the bus and ran around to the other side of the bus station to wait for the return bus. It would be another 37 minutes until we were at the chips stand, I said, and my mom thought I meant it would be a 37 minute wait until the next bus came. Ha! I would not have been so calm if that had been the case. Imagine her surprise and delight when a bus pulled up a few minutes later.

So I guess we got an extra dose of sight-seeing.

Unfortunately, we never did managed to find fish n’ chips because the one we had planned on visiting was closed by the time we got there. Fortunately, said closed fish n’ chips stand was right next to the Tower of London! Unlike the name would have some to believe, the Tower of London is less of a tower and more of an old-ish castle. Much older than dear Buckingham Palace, and surrounded by a plethora of wide turrets.

Not sure what’s happening to my face in that one. It was cold, okay?

We were also pretty stoked to find the Tower Bridge, lit up in the nighttime!

Das my mama in the red, posing unknowingly with the London skyline.

She originally wandered over to that railing to look at the lights and the water, but that’s also how we found the Tower Bridge and the restaurant that would replace the fish n’ chips-shaped hole in our stomachs.

To the left of her is the bridge, but to her right stood a little conglomeration of fairy-light-adorned biodome things with classy people inside of them.

We weren’t quite cool enough to make it into the dome things. In fact, once we walked into the main part of the restaurant, we were worried we weren’t even cool enough to eat there! The music was positively pumping (that’s what the kids are saying these days, right?), everybody was chic and classy and hipster and young, and my mom and I probably looked like a couple of bundled-up deer caught in some super hip headlights.

It’s definitely strange to know that most of the people there were probably my age and yet still looked about fifteen years older and cooler than me. *sigh*. I’ll get there one day.

My mom and I were shown to a table which I am just now realizing was in the farthest back corner of the restaurant next to another (cooler) mother-daughter pair. Ha! Didn’t even notice the severity of the situation we were in.

The food was pretty darn tasty, though. We shared some little fried chicken bites with a delightful dipping sauce, gigantic crab fritters, and some bruschetta heaped with fresh tomatoes. Yum. Mama also got a peach Bellini, but I was still in the bargain-fish-n’-chips mindset, so I stuck to water. Gah. Mistakes.

By the time we made it back to the Airbnb, Jonathan was fast asleep and sprawled in the middle of the bed… He was clearly very productive while we were gone.

About ten minutes after everyone was settled for the night, a really loud popping sound woke us all up with a start, and the smell of smoke instantly wafted through the room. My mom checked her phone, and it seemed my free Seattle City Light charging block had blown a fuse in the outlet. Oh, and it actually managed to blow all the fuses in the entire apartment, so we woke up to dead phones and no WiFi to help me figure out how to get my mom to the airport.

But that’s a story for another post. Stay tuned…

Cheers!

Lizzy-wa