We arrived at London Heathrow fully laden with backpacks and extra bags full of ski/winter gear both very excited to be back in Europe. A taxi ride later and we were at Mum and Dad’s in London and it was really fantastic to see them again.
The plan for the first couple of weeks was to catch up with family and friends, do some exploring of London and buy a van of some sorts to enable us to travel around the UK and Europe. We had given ourselves a month.
First on the list was to catch up with Mum and Dad and get over some jet lag. This seemed to involve eating in a number of delicious restaurants within a stones throw of their house. Where they are in London is a truly amazing place to be able to enjoy so many nationalities’ food without having to drive anywhere or even get any public transport.
While we had seen Mum and Dad a couple of times recently we hadn’t seen my Sister Kelly for quite a few years so it was wonderful to see her, Ben and their two new additions Theo and Bea. Bea was about a month old when we first got to give her a cuddle and it was just great to be able to spend some time catching up with them.
We also managed to catch up with a couple of old friends of mine from Belgium which again was great as we hadn’t all seen each other for so long. Unfortunately though our plans involved us trying to leave the UK fairly quickly in order to get to Europe. (Boring visa reasons)
This meant getting our hands on a van. Quite a lot of research had been done online but there is nothing quite like sitting in a van to make you aware of how much or how little space there is. The van designs in the UK are also quite different to the ones we have in Australia so our biggest concern was that we wouldn’t fit in the bed!
We were lucky that a great VW transporter became an available and on first inspection we both smiled at each other as we realised we had found what we wanted. We snapped it up and began the task of raiding £1 shops and camping stores to kit it out. We were both getting more and more excited each day.
In amongst the trips to see vans and buy camping gear we were actually able to take some time to explore some sights in London. The weather was superb and actually hit 30 degrees a couple of days and this coupled with 9:30pm sunsets meant beautiful long summer’s evenings. It meant we didn’t feel too much in a rush during the day and were able to take some nice walks around the city exploring Camden, Brick Lane, Carnaby st, The Tower of London, The Natural History Museum, The Tate Modern and of course Hyde Park.
The park and in fact a lot of the UK was not mowing for the month of May in order to help repopulate the bees. This meant for some quite spectacular wild flowers growing everywhere and while I am sure it’s not to everyone’s taste I thought it looked quite beautiful.
While we could spend months exploring London and still hardly scratch the surface of what there is to do we had our van and a plan so we set off South to see more of Kelly and Ben while we also had a couple of trips in the van to see if there was anything we needed to fix before we set off. T