London's Calling

This past weekend, I ventured to The Island and spent the weekend with Vince and Joanne in London.  It was an interesting journey there, to say the least.  This side of the world was battered with hurricane like winds on Friday morning, making flying...uhhh fun if you like a little thrill.  Taking off from Amsterdam was a bit rough, but once we were above the clouds it was fine.  It was landing in London that was the issue.  We nearly landed twice, but at the last moment the pilot abandoned the idea and took off again.  The first time it happened I was a bit confused, but not all that worried.  The lady in front of me though, my gosh, it was like the world was going to end.  The way she was bawling you would have thought we were plummeting to our death.  Then, shortly after that, the little boy behind me started throwing up.  That was when I hit my limit and just wanted to get off the plane.  Luckily, third time's the charm and we landed safe and sound with no harm done. I've never been so happy to get off a plane.

Friday evening, I met up with Laura and a few of her friends and we had dinner at a really awesome burger place called Byron, and you wouldn't believe what they had...

Yup, that's exactly what it looks like.  A rootbeer float! With A&W Rootbeer! In London!! Crazy or what?

After dinner, I met up with Vince and Joanne at the theater and we enjoyed some Minchiney goodness in the form of the musical Matilda based off of Roald Dahl's book.  It was absolutely fantastic, and Tim Minchin wrote the music so it was bound to be great.  The talent those children have is absolutely mind blowing though.  Man o' man they can sing.  Unfortunately I cannot find any songs that are directly from the musical, but here's a sample of Tim Minchin singing the song "When I Grow Up" which is the main song from the show.

The rest of the weekend was spent mainly visiting and hanging out with Vince and Joanne.  Saturday, Joanne and I did a bit of shopping.  In the evening we had a fantastic BBQ and Vince consumed enough beef to last him a month. 

Unfortunately there's no scale to show how much larger his steak was compared to the rest, but you need to just take my word for it.  We're all Albertan's and even Joanne and I thought it was ginormous.
Case in Point: he cooked his for about 15 minutes before our steaks went on the grill.

Sunday morning before my flight, Joanne and I ventured out to the auction house near their place to check out a few items.  I think we spent a good hour in there browsing through all the neat antique items.  Some were in excellent shape, some not so much.  Some were super cool, some were just plain weird.  We didn't bid on anything, but it was still really fun to look!

I thought this old leather trunk was really cool.  I figured it would be really fun to shove a small child in there and have a fun photo session.  Aside from the fact that I would never manage to get it home, it smelled like something had died inside of it, and was slightly moldy on the edges.  Forcing a child in there for photos would probably violate some health code.  Too bad though.  Other than that, it would have been a diamond mine of photos!

And that's my weekend in a fairly large nutshell.  I had another adventure with flights getting home.  I got stuck on the Tube in Central London and ended up being really really really late for my flight.  It left at 4:20 and I arrived at the airport at 3:55.  By some stroke of luck though, I managed to catch the flight and was let through even though the gate had closed already.  Thank you EasyJet!