Off to London

We took off today from Monte Carlo to the airport in Nice in a private transfer arranged by Manulife - we are not sad to say goodbye to Monte Carlo.  While it was nice to be treated to the trip, we found it was too small and too expensive - it just didn't offer enough for the vacation part of the trip.

We're hoping that London will be better.  We flew Easyjet, an inexpensive European airline charter that is so cheap its ridiculous.  Its only an hour and a half flight and then we took the train into the city center of London and then a cab to our flat we've rented.  All in all a fairly uneventful trip here.  On the train we bought a couple of waters, a bag of crackers for the girls and Jay got a Mars bar and it was 5 GBP.  I said to Jay, the good thing about coming here after Monte Carlo is that everything seems cheap!

We got into the flat and were met by Gus a rep from One Fine Stay, where I booked the flat through.  He showed us around the apartment, gave us some advice on where to eat, gave us the keys and left us to settle.  The rental company gives you an iphone to use while you're in London - so we have an iPhone with 3G to use for maps, etc while we're here!

Once we had a few minutes to just gather ourselves, we went out to go to the park.  Our flat is just down the street from Hyde Park, only about a 2 minute walk to the entrance off of Notting Hill Gate - and from that entrance only a 3 minute walk to the Princess Diana memorial playground which (in addition to the private garden) was one of the reasons I booked this particular location.

After about 20 minutes of playing it started to rain a little bit so we went and found a place to eat and had a great meal.  At dinner Paige started to whine because her eggs were served on top of the ham on the plate...while Sophie just had a bite of her ham.  So I said to Sophie - "Oh, wow - well you just earned a travel star"  (Anyone remember our imaginary check marks that we used to give the girls?  Well just like the check marks the travel stars are frickin' awesome).  We had no whining during dinner, they both ate their entire meal - they earned 2 travel stars each and another half of one later when they didn't complain during their bath and hair wash...such a nice meal and evening with them behaving like angels trying to earn the stars.  We'll have to figure out how much a star is worth and what the prize is - but I don't even care, its so worth it to bribe them to behave - especially when it works so well!  (they even tidied their room and emptied their suitcases without being asked!)...

So far we love London - Jay wants to try to convince the girls to go to University here...haha - until he looked in a real estate window and saw the prices!

Now I'm all caught up on the blog and off to bed!