We awoke this morning at Cooper's Hill Retirement Village where we all had a wonderful night of sleep! JG & P were guests in R's residence and J & I had the pleasure of staying in the one & only guest suite which residents can rent out for visiting friends. This is a classy retirement village! It is run by Audley and they have a number of retirement villages throughout the United Kingdom. Our boys slept through the night (and in P's case until 8:30 am when his brother awoke him!), while J and I awoke briefly at 3 am. We were able to fall back asleep though! Pretty great considering we had seven time zones to adjust to.
We had packed our bags to reflect just what we needed for one overnight in London. R took our big bags with him back to his home where we will meet him later tomorrow. By 10 am we were on the road driving to London with R at the wheel. R did so many things to prepare for our visit and make us feel welcome including purchasing SIM cards for P and I to use in our phones without exorbitant data roaming charges! R had The Bailey's Hotel programmed into his car GPS system so we could drop off our small carry on bags at the hotel so we could explore the city unencumbered by bags! R then continued to drive us around London to see the major sites, like Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower Bridge, the London Eye etc. He was a rock star navigating the traffic and acting as our tour guide while making his way to the Borough Market where he dropped us off around lunch time.
At Borough Market we had a couple of hours to wander around. JG and J bought mushroom and chicken pies for lunch. P and I had fish (cod) and chips - all of it was very tasty. The reason R dropped us off in this location was because we had purchased tickets for a walking (and underground) tour to see parts of London used in the filming of the Harry Potter series. Our guide Louis (pronounced Lu-ee) was excellent. One of the ways he made this tour interactive was to sort all of us into the four Hogwarts Houses and ask trivia questions about the book/movie series. Our family successfully answered a number of questions to help Ravenclaw for the win!
We saw sites used for the filming of the visit to the Ministry of Magic, Gringott's Bank and the Millennium Bridge which collapsed in the third book (this bridge nearly collapsed in real life, in the year 2,000, the day after it was opened to the public and it apparently had significant structural shortcomings, so a two year long $5 million pound update was necessary.) There are 38 bridges crossing the Thames River in London and the Millennium bridge is the narrowest one, so it was the most economical to recreate in the movie. That bridge collapsing scene was the most expensive filmed in all of the 8 Harry Potter movies.
This photo is of the South African embassy- and the outside was used to film Gringott's Bank.
After our guided tour was finished, we caught the Underground on the Picadilly line to Gloucester Road to our hotel. We checked into our lovely hotel (where one of our rooms was courtesy of my sister LC!). We each also carried beautiful Yeti water bottles with about one litre of water in them courtesy of LC. And it was a good thing too - London was 27 C today and we needed to keep hydrated!
After a quick clean up we headed out for supper to Nando's. We were all happy with our meals! JG had a vegetarian dish and the rest of us had chicken! When we returned to our rooms, I worked on this blog - then the other 3 went on a walk towards Kensington Garden. J especially wanted to go shortly after 8 pm as he was trying not to fall asleep!
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