London sightseeing and overnight to Amsterdam

Andi and I jumped outta bed around 8am for Breakfast and Facebook then went back to bed. Around noon we were trying to sleep through the loud, language-barrier strained convo between the French girls and Latin American boys who were sharing our room when one of the girls from the front desk came to find us, saying Nick and Tim were waiting in the lobby for us. We crawled out of bed and hauled our jet lagged asses as best we could.

We took the underground to a tourist-y area, then grabbed a snack and started walking. We hit up the natural history museum, the Victoria and Albert museum, Hyde park Buckingham palace and a guard building. This was the Nick Detmer patented checklist approach to sightseeing, where you spend just long enough at each place to tell an anecdote and show people your pics later. We headed back to the hostel, got changed and chatted with a couple of cool aupairs from Switzerland who were also staying in our room.

We left the Hostel to meet up with people from some other Mongol Rally teams at a bar called George. They were mostly boys, who were chill, funny and a little bit anxious. We realized that we weren't the only ralliers who were massively under prepared and I think it made us all feel a lot better. Tim and another of Nick's world-travelling friends, Andreas, came out to meet us as well. We switched pubs when George closed, drank for a little while longer, then Andi and I cabbed it back to the hostel. We sorted out some finances, bought travel insurance and then crashed HARD.

In the morning we sorted our luggage, booked our overnight bus to Amsterdam. We had breakfast in the hostel with this cool bike tourist from Kansas city and then checked out. Andrea's foot was kind of wrecked from a photo-op mishap the day before so we weren't up for any more whirlwind sightseeing. We ended up bumming around on Tim's couch for most of the day, laughing at how low budget UK music videos are. Nick said he wanted to go out but we only made it as far as Mark & Spencer's, got some ingredients then headed back to Tim for bacon and mushroom pasta. We continued to veg, watched some Top Gear then Andi and I split to catch our bus.

The bus was fine, a little bit sketchy but not bad at all. The only brutal thing was that we had to get off the bus on the ferry, so we didn't get much sleep. It was a relief the to get to the Amsterdam... to be covered in my next post.

XO
EC