London part 2

06/15/2006, 14:38 PM

Ok, so where I left off we were just leaving London. After we started driving we decided to go and visit the Windsor Castle in a town right outside of London. The castle was huge!! However, the inside wasn't as great as they said it would be. For one, you couldn't take pictures inside the castle. That was disappointing. Second, the tour was lacking a lot. There wasn't much to see. But we did finally get to see one of the royal guardsman up close and get a pic taken with him. Poor guy. He has to stand there all day and deal with all the tourists. But then again, people fight to get that job.

One cool thing about Windsor castle was St. George's Church. We got the see the semi-recently deceased (2002) Queen Mother Elizabeth. Not the current Queen Mother Elizabeth, the current one is her daughter. So now on my trips I have seen the graves of the pope and the Queen Mother, I wonder who will be next.

Now, I wanted to leave the castle earlier than we did and we probably should have because we missed our original ferry to France. But we were able to get on the 645pm ferry. That's is where I am as I write this in a note book. Our first ferry trip was smooth sailing/ but this trip is what the captain calls "slight" sailing. Lets just say that I cant walk in a straight line on the ship. LOL. So I decided to just sit up front at the window and continue the blog.

Hopefully today I will be able to actually see France. When we were in France on Sunday/Monday it was way too dark to see anything so hopefully this time I will be able to.

I wish that some how you all could feel what its like to be on board this ferry right now. Its a definitely interesting experience. Everyone should have to sail on choppy waters, but not too choppy, to feel what its like at least once.

My mother and I are deciding whether now would be a good time to talk to a publisher/editor about publishing our blogs into books or if we should wait a while. Its almost been a year and a half since we started writing our blogs and we have quite a bit of text now. But we still plan on traveling more, I mean why stop traveling right? We would publish the books as a mother/daughter double sided book. You read one persons blog and then flip the book over and its the other blog, Cool huh? It might even work as a book series. Ok, well the ship is almost to France, so its time to continue our journey Au via as they say in French.

LATER THAT NIGHT

Ok, well the GPS system was working when we left the ferry but now (in France) for some reason it says we have no gaps program or something like that. So here we are driving around France with no map and no gps. We should be able to make our way back but GRRRR what a pain. Not to mention we still have bout 5 hours of driving left. YIKES! And the trip was going so well....

One lil thing I forgot to mention in the last blog was that I finally got another stamp in my passport going on to the ferry from France to England. So now I have one from Italy and one from the UK. *even though we have been to Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and England....* We think its because now these countries are part of the EU so there aren't really any patrolled boarders.....

EVEN LATER THAT NIGHT

OK, once again, because we have the Ortega curse, we find ourselves lost in the middle of France. With no maps and no GPS. Go fig, huh? But at least we are heading towards Paris....


FINALLY HOME, Thursday night

Ok, so somewhere around 2am we decided to buy and damn map and figure where the hell we were. Pretty much we navigated across the whole damn country of France. And we didn't even see Paris! We spent a crap load on gas and tolls just to get home. We left our hotel at about 1130am wed. And didn't get home to Hanau until 10am Thursday. How did it take us twice as long?? Its funny how a small distance going the wrong way can double the time it takes to get home. We did get to see France in the day light but all it seemed to be was fields, fields and more fields. And they didn't even have a great radio station so I spent most of the trip trying to find one. By the time we got across the boarder in to Germany we were so glad to hear German! Its funny how that works.

We got into the house about 1030am and I fell right to sleep. I woke up a few times but pretty much slept right til 9pm. What a journey, but hey, my mother and I cant have a trip without getting extremely lost at least once.

until next adventure....