Tim & Denise Tiner Travels: 2019 Europe w/Wayment’s - Day 02 - Dover White Cliffs, Dover Castle and London.

March 30, 2019

Our stay outside Dove was awesome. The cottage was so nice and had everything that we needed. Unfortunately, I was texting Travis about the Jazz game at 3:30 AM (London Time). I slept hard for about 2.5 hours then woke up around 1:00 AM and could not get back to sleep. I think I finally fell back asleep around 4:30 AM waking back up at 7:30 AM. We all showered and then we made breakfast of scramble eggs (farm fresh Ashley), real English muffins and hot cross buns with raisins. I even had a bowl of cereal. It was yummy!

We left Diane’s place (who we never met due to her being trapped in traffic on the M25) around 9 AM or a little after. We tried to find the White Cliffs of Dover and our GPS took us down to the shipyards. We kind of started to give up and headed back towards the castle but could not get in there yet either. So we kept driving and eventually turned on a road that took us right to the White Dover Cliff park where you could walk trails and see the cliffs real good. And that is what we did. We went for a good hike...about an hour out and back. We got some nice pictures and Denise and Ilene did not fall over the edge. They got way too close for my good!!!! Anyway, it was cool and nice. The only bummer was the marine layer had not lifted out in the ocean so we could not see across the English Channel. I was going to see if I could swim across! :-)

After our hiking, we headed to the Dover Castle. Wow...what a big site. it was a really nice castle. And in one of the old rooms, they actually had a fire burning. I’ve been in lots of castles but never have I seen a large fire burning in one of the big, fancy rooms. That was fun. We wanted to see more of it but kind of ran out of time as it quickly got to 12:30 PM and we had to make a 2 hour drive to get the rental car back at LHR by around 3 PM. The pictures of the castle will hopefully show more than words can do. We did eat lunch at the cafe there. It was pretty good.

The drive took a bit longer than we had hoped. We actually found out that our car had a GPS on it. So we fired that up and was using that merrily. But for some reason, it took us off the freeway. For a bit, we thought it was ok. But then our arrival time was growing. I asked Ilene to turn her Google Maps back on. That instantly said we had to turn around and go back where we had came and get back on the freeway....which we did. We still do not know what was going on. Anyway, once we arrived in the LHR area, we could not find a darn gas station. We wasted another 15 to 20 minutes roaming around trying to find gas. We eventually did. We arrived at EuropCar at 3:45 roughly. All good...just a bit longer than planned.

Our next thing to do was to now use The Tube to travel into downtown London. We figured it out, even using our WiFi credit cards (Kim, Denise and I) or Android Pay (Ilene), how to get on the Piccadilly line an head into London. We had to make one train switch. We helped a lady who had a ton of bags with her bags. And in turn, she made sure we grabbed the right train connection. It went smoothly. Ilene was a master guide using her phone to get us to the hotel which is right by Victoria train station. Upon entering, we noticed a nicely set up bar of cheeses, olives, breads, crackers, honeycomb, jellies and so on. Eureka...we were getting hungry. It was approaching 5 PM. So we checked into our amazingly SMALL rooms and then went back down for some grub. It was good. Will be there tomorrow night too.

Our rooms...I think my pillow will bump up against the shower and toilet. That is all I’ll say. Very clean, very nice. VERY SMALL!

Around 6 PM, we headed for the London Eye. Ilene and Denise really wanted to ride that bugger. From a long distance, It looked like it was not turning. But as you got closer, it was. It was a good 30 minute walk from our hotel to get over the Thames River and over the the London Eye. The two women paid the massive price to do this. The two men, they went and bought a couple of Hot Dogs and just waited for these two ladies. They loved it. And now that is checked off of their bucket lists. I, too, can’t wait to see the pictures.

We are tired. We have sore feet. And tomorrow we are up early to get to 9 AM church before we head out and see more of London. Crazy pace...but having fun.

Some pictures:

Pictures of our stay at Diane’s Cottage outside Dover.