London 2

Friday evening:
We went to our hotel (St.Athan's), not far from Euston Station - We got a family room - lucky we didn't bring the cat!! 1 double bed and 2 singles and about 3 square feet of floor space - toilet 30 second walk away and shower around the corner all for the bargain price of 80 pounds per night!!

So Kristin and the boys took me on the tour of London (They had done most of this during the day - see Billy's Blog) at night (4:30 in the afternoon) for a couple of hours. We saw Trafalgar Square, Nelson's Column, Covent Garden, Picadilly Circus, Eros's statue, St. James Park, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminster, The London Eye and then we worked our way back towards the hotel.

Here we found a nice Indian restaurant and ate tea - by 9:30 we were back at the hotel and in bed asleep!

London
Hi all,
We have just spent 2 days in London - here is a brief summary of London:

Fri (4:00 am) - Woke, showered ate a quick brekky and were on the road before 5 am.
Extremely cold and foggy, as soon as we went over the Severn Bridge (links Wales to England) the fog got real bad, after an hour we had used up all the water in the windscreen wahser, so we pulled up at a "Services" (for Aussies a petrol station on the freeway). We took about 5 minutes to open the bonnet (bloody French car with everything on the wrong side! - Well spotted Peter Meaden re sunroof!). The windscreen was half frozen and very salty (they had been salting the road). After filling the washer and tried to squirt the windscreen - the "squirters had frozen up and now no water could come out - FUN! Finally got back on the road 15 minutes later and icing on the windscreen was hardly a problem after this - although Kristin's side froze up because no water was coming out of the "squirter" on her side.

Arrived at Euston (2 km north of the Thames in London) at about 8 am. The GPS has already paid for itself about 4 times over!

I was lucky enough to spend most the day inside listening to people talk, whereas Kristin, Billy, Declan and Thyson (An exchangee's boy) went walking the town, here are some shots:
Yes there was blue sky (remember I spent all day inside - see the next days and pics!!)

School

Hi all,

I have survived the first 3 days of school and the Billy and Declan has started to settle in. For more of Billy's tales read his BLOG (http://www.billyinwales.blogspot.com/).

I am furiously learning how to use an interactive whiteboard. There are very few textbooks in the school. The students in a way are similar to Rosebud students but do not have the aspirations to go to higher education. I will make more comments when I have a better understanding if the system, etc...

Attached are some pics of us going to school from outside our house. It is dark because it is about 10 to 8 in the morning!

Cheers (Lechyd da!)

Tintern (more pics)

Tintern Abbey - built about 1130 AD and abandoned about 1540 AD - one of the first abbeys in europe of this design! Very impressive ruin. Even Billy & Declan were impressed!

Raglan Castle (another castle!!)

On sat(3rd) it reached a high of 1 degree, but that didn't deter us going for a trip to the Big Pit - A coal mine & museum - not much different to similar museums in Australia (e.g. Sovereign Hill, Walhalla, LaTrobe Valley). In fact the atmosphere here , grey and cloudy, reminds me of the LaTrobe Valley. Any white you see in the pics is ice - these were taken at midday!!

A few of the locals as well!