Off With a Pit Stop in London!

We are off to Madrid...Spain? First and foremost I gotta do a shout out to Virgin Airlines.  They make peasants like us who sit in 2nd class feel like first class people for those few hours in the sky. Seriously they are awesome, you get a welcome kit with a toothbrush, an eye mask, ear plugs, a pen, some other stuff I can't remember (maybe an iPad?) and a blanket so awesome we had to keep it and stuff it in our bag. This red blanket has come in handy many a times already.  Their meals were amazing too, when Heidi and I flew them to London a few years ago we both agreed that the airplane food on the way over was the best we had our whole trip. Maybe it means that food in England sucks, or maybe Virgin is that good.  K done with the advertising, I guess just having flown RyanAir to Morocco (we are now in Marrakech we have some catch up posts to make) we have an even stronger appreciation for good airlines.  I'll get to this more later, but we were laughing that RyanAir likes to "punish" their customers for trying to book such cheap flights. Their slogan "You can fly cheap with us, but there will be hell to pay for it." hahah more on that later!

One thing we did realize when buying our flight to Madrid was that we had a layover in London.  One thing we did not realize was that the flight leaving after the layover in London was out of a DIFFERENT airport than the one we landed in.  Who would've thought that?? Kayak did us wrong but maybe that's why our flight was so cheap.  Good thing our flight attendant on our LA flight pointed it out to us.  Details. Apparently this small airport outside of London called Gatwik was an hour bus ride from Heathrow.  At that point we were very grateful for the five hour layover.  We made the most of it and instead of taking a bus straight to Gatwick we took the "tube" into the city and figured we would catch a bus from there to this random airport.

 

We picked a random stop to get off at and when we got up from the tube it was rainy and cold! This is why we picked mostly Southern Europe countries to hit up this time of year.  We noticed some cool buildings in front of us so figured we made a good choice on the tube stop and started to walk around.

"Is there anything cool to see nearby?" Robby asked an old couple next to us.  "Um, yes you're standing right in front of Buckingham Palace." I'm sure they were thinking "stupid tourists" but come on shouldn't the palace have a sign and some red carpet leading in?? Or shouldnt the Queen be outside greeting people? Let's pretend that I had never been there before too.  Haha so there you go- before catching the train to Gatwick we got a tour of the palace and had one of the best ham and cheese sandwiches I've ever had! Both Robby and I agree that a couple hours roaming London totally counts as another city/country hit on this trip.  Add it to the list, it was a great pit stop!

                          It's a fake out guard!!

This wasn't even the start of our real adventures, we are already having the time of our lives but I'll write more later! Typing on an IPad is rough! Next up is Spain- Toledo and Madrid!