Trip Part 2 England(Part 1)

So after traveling for 2 ½ hours via train from Paris it was now time to try to find our train to get to Bedford. After asking some very helpful people we ran down to the platform to catch our train. It was nice to finally be able to ask questions and understand people. I was really nervous about finding our house boat. I had all these fears in my head that we were gonna get lost, get on the wrong train, etc etc. So when we got off at the train station another very helpful gentleman helped us out and rather than walking we decided we would grab a cab to make it easier. They dropped us off at the hotel near the marina so we had to do some searching, but found the check in for the boat. We checked in and got our key.

She was a decent sized boat, although our bed was a bit on the small side. Since the boat had a kitchen in it we decided we would go get some groceries at the nearest grocery store. We headed out for about a mile and went to the Tesco. Everything was pretty decent priced which was nice considering the exchange rate. So of course while we were shopping we forgot that we were walking, and we had bought enough food for the week. It ended up being a rather comical walk home.

So Rodney cooked us up a very yummy chicken along with potatoes and some wine. It was a very yummy dinner. We went to bed really early that night so we could get an early start the next day.

We had to head to London to pick up our pass for some of the things we wanted to see, so we jumped on the 9:30 am train thinking that would get us there and back with plenty of time. What I wasn’t prepared for was someone to jump in front of our train!!! We were about 20 min from London when all of a sudden this horrible sound happens. I figured it was some garbage that was sitting on the tracks. So they make an announcement that we hit something and that we were going to stop for a minute. So about 15 minutes goes by and then a ton of passengers on the train start getting phone calls from people saying, are you on the train that hit somebody. Nice. SO they start making an announcement every 20 minutes or so that we were delayed due to a person being hit in the area. By this time everyone has figured out that we have hit a person. After 2 ½ hours of sitting on the train the Police finally showed up. After they collected the evidence, we were finally allowed to leave about 3 ½ hours later. Of course we didn’t bring any food or things to do because we jumped on the fast train to London!!! Yeah we found out that they aren’t always so fast. So after transferring to a different train and finally getting into the station well after 3:00 we start walking to find the place to pick up our tickets. London is a very large. So after walking for an hour and a half we finally found the place for the tickets. To bad it closed at 3:00!!! We jumped on the tube, headed back to the train station and went back to the boat.

We spent the next day sleeping in and walking around Bedford, which was the town we were staying in. It was nice to just kind of check out the sites. We went to High Street and checkout out some of the stores (as anyone who knows us can attest, we love to shop, especially on vacation) We found a ton of cute clothes for all of us. We decided to hold out until later in the trip to buy them. Then we went to a pub and had some dinner, went back to the boat and hung out. The one bad thing about England was that EVERYTHING closed up really early. Restaurants closed at like 8:00 and the pubs were shut down by 11:00 pm. We were not really used to that.

We decided that today was the day we were going to get our pass and that we were not going to go to London again so we went to Dover instead. So after riding the train for 4 ½ hours we finally got to Dover. In Dover is one of the largest castles in England, called Dover castle.

I really wanted to go check it out, but since we really wanted to see Bodium Castle we decided to head there. So after another 2 hour train ride we made it to the town to see Bodium. We took our most expensive cab ride yet (25 pounds)