Paint It Black

I see London and I want to paint it black. Seriously, we are not fans of London right now.

So we tried to avoid London entirely because Monopoly money has more value than the American dollar. Maybe I should've brought a bag full of hemp, we could've sold it to offset some of our losses. However, it was (supposedly) unavoidable (when we booked it), so we saw it as a necessary evil. There is no such necessary evil in the world. A tube (subway) ride for two -- American -- over $13. Yeah, turn to black, London, see what I care.

We arrived, having just left the land of perpetual daylight and six dollar vodka (Iceland) to $9/hr. WiFi, an $18 lunch of coffee and pre-packaged sandwiches and a need for transportation. Taking a train from Gatwick to London Central, we arrived to a standard London summer (from what I understand) -- rain and cold. Schlepped our luggage around only to learn that Monday was a French National Holiday and therefore the soonest we could arrive by bus was Wednesday morning (it was Sunday afternoon), and the Eurostar was roughly 600 American.

At the Eurostar office, little more seemed possible. That was until a very kind Richard and David worked their magic on the system and got us just outside Paris via Lille. "It was a bit longer", they'd tell us, but at half-price and an hour difference, we'd manage. The only problem, the train left at 10:30am.

So off to nightly quarters we saunter, into a colder, wetter, London night. Thirty minutes and a bar of $3 chocolate later, we finally found ourselves at the central Florence Hotel. The dirtiest, dingiest, light-literally-hanging-by-a-cord-in-the-middle-of-the-ceiling shithole akin to the Griswold dwellings in European Vacation that London had to offer. Nearly $80. Look at the pictures. Let's just say I woke up to a pigeon staring me in the face. I didn't like him much.

We checked-out early, pretty much just to be out of that void in civility, and boarded the train for outside Paris. We were unaware, but pleasantly so, that our train was the London express to Euro Disney! Which meant... kids! We love kids (so long as we can give them back), so we spent the whole journey to outside Paris in the wild imagination of an eight-year-old Abigail and her seasoned mother, surrounded by wild-eyed, excitable youths never cracking the double digit age range. 

We arrived, a few beers and a memory of French countryside destroying the hell of London to promises of better times ahead. Surely this had been our low point. Surely...