Jamie Thingelstad

This morning we decided to head to Harrods (store) and visit the worlds largest department store. My first piece of advise is to treat Harrods like an amusement park. Don’t plan to actually shop there unless you want to burn through significant £’s. There is some nice stuff there, but the prices match it. I was thrown back by kids shirts marked at £79.95 ($149.97 as of today). But then again, I don’t think I’ve even seen Juicy Couture for 3 year olds.¹ Tammy compared Harrods to a casino without the gambling, which is a good approximation. Cruise ship would also be close, but not nice enough.

Even with the ridiculous price tags we had a really fun time just walking around. Mazie had a blast in the kids department with loads of toys and babies. She got to pick one thing to get and much to her parents chagrin desperately wanted a baby that we could get for $12 at home but got to pay £14.95 ($28.04) for.

It was fun to walk around in the household stuff and see all the cool Euro fixtures and such. There are so many more modern options here than at home. We stayed from open through lunch and had some very good pizza in the food hall followed by a nice gelato for desert. We wisely chose a weekday for our visit, and also chose the morning to avoid larger crowds in the afternoon. Happily we didn’t have to queue a lot and could tell that the afternoon was getting notably busier as we left.

Our London trip is a lot different from our Summer of Love West Coast Road Tour. Notably, we aren’t on the road very much for London and with the exception of a short jaunt to Scotland for Tammy and I, we are staying put in London proper.

We rented an apartment for the month and have gotten settled in. We are in the Kensington area at Philbeach Gardens. The apartment is good. We have about 800 square feet and behind the apartment is a very large private courtyard where Mazie can play. I think the nicest thing about the apartment is the dining room with a glass ceiling. I’ve setup my computer in this area with great light.

On the downside we are missing some niceties. Mainly what was advertised as included Internet access is really a 3G HSDPA Modem (Huawei E220). It’s better than nothing, but you have to tip toe around the Internet and wait for long delays. We have a washing machine but no dryer, I guess we just hang our clothes to dry.

We went shopping for some supplies at a nearby Tesco. It took us over an hour to find what we were looking for. It’s great that London is English, but there is no doubt you are in a foreign country. It took us about 10 minutes to find baking soda.

Here are photos for a little virtual tour.

The trick with spending a month in London is that you have to get there, and that has to be done on a plane. Mazie had never been on a plane before and we bullishly pushed through with a trans-atlantic flight as her very first one. Tammy has been on many flights, but has a very real fear of flying causing much stress and anxiety. She was an absolute rock star though keeping all of that to herself and not causing any undue stress for Mazie.

We departed at 9:45 p.m. For whatever reason I felt it absolutely necessary to get to the airport at 6:30 p.m. Having never flown with a kid, and knowing we had 5 bags to check, I figured we needed all the time we could get. In reality, we checked all 5 bags in a few minutes at the curb and flew through security without any issues. With over an hour to spare we decided to have desert at Ike’s in the airport. They have a chocolate cake that is a foot tall, rather crazy actually.

The flight itself was fine, but getting Mazie to sleep was not. I had this idea that we would leave at 9:45 p.m. and after the excitement of takeoff ended Mazie would just naturally fall asleep. This was not the case. She didn’t go to bed until 1:30 a.m. central time. We tried everything short of medication and nothing would work. I got furious with the screens in the back of every chair that constantly flashed different messages at us, keeping Mazie enthralled with them.

Anyway, she finally got to sleep and I crashed about the same time. Tammy on the other hand spent most of the night playing Quordy on her iPhone and got maybe 15 minutes of sleep.

After landing we collected all of our luggage, got through customs, and found a cab for the £55 ride into Kensington. I’m trying to not do £ to $ conversions here since it’s just depressing.

Our first day here was spent mostly recovering from jet lag. We were all crazy tired.