Edwards Adventure in Paris: London

In April we went to London for the weekend to visit Derek, Megin, Jake, and Logan who had been in town for the week as Derek was attending a conference. It would be the first time the cousins had seen each other since we left for Paris last August.

We took the Eurostar over on Friday evening and met up with them at Westminster Abbey on Saturday morning. After sharing hugs and catching up a bit, we went inside the ancient abbey. Unlike most tourist attractions, they've totally figured out how to keep kids engaged. Each kid gets a clipboard, activity sheet, and pencil. The activity sheet directs them on a tour of the abbey, the same tour that we adults want to take to see all of its sights. The key, though, is the incentive. If the kids finish the activity sheet, they get a chocolate coin at the exit. That kept their attention and helped all of us really enjoy our visit.

After Westminster Abbey, we jumped on a train to the outskirts of London and the Harry Potter Studio Tour. The studios are where all eight movies were filmed and where the young actors largely spent their childhoods -- where they worked, studied, and grew up.

The studio visit was something that the kids were anxiously awaiting -- we bought the tickets months in advance -- and it lived up to its billing. We began with a visit to the Hogwart's Great Hall, finished with the scale model of Hogwart's, and in between saw a variety of sets, props, and displays showing the details of how the films were made. Even as someone who hasn't seen the movies (I've been waiting first to read the books), I really enjoyed the visit. For Paige, who has seen every movie and read each book between two and five times, it was magical.

On Sunday, our plan was to check out of our hotel, drop our bags off at the train station, then meet up with Derek & Megin & the boys at the Tower of London. What we didn't sufficiently plan for was the London Marathon. We knew it was happening -- it was a week after the bombings at the Boston Marathon and all eyes were on London -- but since it was above ground and we'd be traveling by the underground Tube, we didn't anticipate it would affect us.

The first problem we ran into was getting our bags checked in at the train station. While Erin and the kids waited outside, I ran into the St. Pancras station to check the bags and encountered a huge line. Instead of waiting in that, I decided to run across the street to the Kings Cross station and try there. It too had a long line so I went back outside to regroup with Erin and figure out what we wanted to do. We decided that I would go in and wait in the lines and send ahead Erin and the kids to meet Derek & Megin since we were already late.

That normally wouldn't have been that bad of a plan. Unfortunately, the routing from the Tube station at King's Cross/St. Pancras to Tower Hill wasn't at all clear and once you got to Tower Hill you had to cross the marathon route to get to the Tower. In the end, I reached Derek first, over an hour late, and then Erin & the kids showed up another 15-20 minutes later. It was a bit stressful -- not knowing where in the city they might be and not having phones to connect -- and I wish we wouldn't have separated. But fortunately it all worked out more or less okay.

We always enjoy visiting the Tower and hearing its stories from the Beefeater guards but the kids didn't have the attention span. They did enjoy seeing the Crown Jewels and then sitting down for a nice lunch at the cafeteria. We then bid Derek's family farewell for a few months and headed back to pick up our baggage and catch the Eurostar back to Paris.