Mike & Trace World Tour: London

DAY ONE

We arrived back in London at midday, after an extremely early morning (or you could have said late night) 2.45am!!

We made our way to Andrew and Claire’s on the subway which was nice and easy, we’re pretty well practiced on the underground systems now!

That afternoon we caught up on emails and blog updates. It was great to spend some time with Andrew and Claire and enjoy a lovely home cooked meal (something we are really missing!).

DAY TWO

Our body clocks were still in Egypt time which was two hours ahead of London so we were up at a reasonable hour. Harry, Andrew and Claire’s four year old son, decided we should go to the park with him. We spent the morning at the park playing on the slides and swings. It was a lovely sunny day in London.

Harry enjoying the playground

Trace and Charlotte – she is such a happy baby, always smiling!

Harry on the swing, with Trace in the background pushing Mike giving Harry a helping hand to balance on the beam

That afternoon we caught the train into Oxford street and did a bit of shopping, our main mission was to purchase a tri-pod which we succeeded in for our travels to Africa.

We meet up with Rory, Shelley and Kate Jamo at the Wooden shades bar in Liverpool. We took a walk down brick lane which for us was taking a trip back in time to Egypt. All the restaurant staff were out on the streets, “25% discount, Ill give you two bottles of wine, two free beers also”. We weighed up the options and settled on a nice Indian restaurant. It was delicious.

Thanks Rory, Shelley and Jamo for coming to catch up with us, it was great!

The London locals sussing out the best way to get the Kiwi’s back home… Notice the world moving fast behind them as they stare at our subway map! Mike, Trace, Rory, Shelly and Kate. We realised just how brown we were after having dinner with these guys!

DAY THREE

We rose early as we knew we had a lot to organise before we departed for Africa. Get US dollars, organise shipping home and repack our packs for Africa.

We started by seeing if we could get American dollars off our Bank of New Zealand American dollars card. This was not an easy task, Mike went to all the ATMs in Harpenden and not one of them would withdrawal in US dollars. He then went to all banks in the area and none of them would allow him to take US dollars out. They all wanted us to withdrawal in Pounds and then convert to US dollars.

We spent the rest of the morning on the internet and phone trying to find if there was a bank or an ATM who would accept our US dollar card. We thought that we had found one so took a trip into London central to see if we could withdrawal the funds. To our disappointment this ATM did not accept our card. We ended up having to withdraw in Pound from our USD card and then convert to US dollars again… Costly, and a pain!! Luckily we had a fair amount of pounds left over too so we saved a bit on conversion fees there.

After sorting our our money situation we took the train out to Mike’s cousins home, Katy, Sam and their two children. This was a great night and it was lovely to catch up with the family.