10 July Friday – 12 July Sunday

By the time we got to Guildford we were pro's at hoisting luggage on and off tubes, trains and escalators (even me!).

We stayed at Lisa and Trev’s from Thursday evening to Sunday morning. It was lovely to spend time with them, just relaxing...

Lisa and I have been friends since we were six years old and I could not imagine a life without her in it. We may live on different continents now, but we stay in contact, pretty much daily. Still, it’s nice to see each other in the flesh every now and then. It’s been nearly 18 months since we last saw each other, so it was good to get together again.

We got to see their girls too, but only briefly. And we got to meet Harvey, Lisa's "baby" - he's an indoor bunny!

Rox, Cait and Paulzie

Paula with Harvey

In the short time we were together we: shopped up a storm at a shopping centre in Woking (much to the disgust of the men involved); we had a lovely lunch next to a lake, had a traditional English breakfast in a pub, wandered around Guildford, but mainly we just relaxed.

By Sunday our batteries were re-charged and we trundled off on the train to London again. We left our luggage at the hotel and set off for Little Venice where we had a fantastic roast lunch in a pub. We then caught a barge to Camden market. Enjoyed the barge trip, but Camden was busy, crowded and totally over-rated.

We had quite some difficulty checking into our hotel rooms. The woman at the desk clearly told us we were on the first floor, but our cards wouldn’t work in the respective doors. Grant went downstairs and got new cards, came back and still our doors would not open. Then a couple of South African boys on a Contiki tour arrived at “our” door stuck their card in and it opened first time. They were very sweet and quite happy to have Rox move in with them ;-) Eventually it transpired that we had the correct room, but on the wrong floor – we were meant to be on the 4th floor.

Once we had checked into our rooms and unpacked we were pretty tired and decided to supper locally. We found a little Chinese down the road and had a nice meal there.