10.20.10
Our favorite past time in ENGLAND?! Of course we went. We spent a pretty £ for those tickets, but they were worth it! We weren't able to cheer too loud for USA, but luckily we are still fans of Hardy and Bisping and fit in pretty well. We drove into London this time and decided to get a last minute hotel outside of London. If we have learned anything about traveling to London it is that travel takes 2-3 times longer than you have planned and of course this trip wasn't any different.
We were on the road at 2 pm and managed to sit in traffic an extra 3 hours with roads closed prior to the fights. Darren was freaking out because he thought the fights started at 4, so we quickly parked our car on the opposite side of the river as the
O2 Arena and proceeded to ask someone how to get across. The tube. Of course, why didn't we think of that? Found the tube and we were in such a hurry we didn't even look to see where we were. "Worry about it later", I say. "We're near an ASDA".(Wal-Mart) Little did I know those words would bite me in the butt later!
So we made the fights, an hour early-haha, and had a great time. Minus some guy who was extremely intoxicated and almost fell from the upper balcony where we were sitting. We were wayyy up in the nose bleeds, but had a huge screen in front of us.
At the end of the night we got on the tube and immediately I thought, "This is the wrong way." Well, we remembered Bank and that was where we stopped. We walked up to street level and saw a massive monument. Nope, definitely not where we parked. We got all turned around! When we asked for directions, no one knew where ASDA was or the
o2 Arena, except the nice man at McDonalds. He said to get back on the tube and go to Cross Harbor-made sense. I wanted to get back on the tube, but Darren had lost his ticket and didn't want to go back in. (stubborn) I wasn't going to go by myself, so we used the GPS and iPhone to try to navigate, no luck. The tube closed at midnight, so there we were stuck in the middle of London at midnight. After we walked for a couple hours we managed to wave down a cabbie to stop and help us. We tried to explain our situation to him on the way to wherever our car was. Pretty much we just wanted to be in a nice warm car. haha! Luckily he knew where ASDA was! Three hours and one expensive £20 cab ride later, we finally got to our car, but we still had 20 miles to the hotel. It took 2 hours to get there with more traffic and road closures! Ugh! Now I know why people take the train!!! Somewhere around 4 am we made it to the hotel and had to check out at 11 am. Crazy. I like to go with the flow, but I'm beginning to think spontaneous is not the way to go here. Planning ahead is very important. At the end of the day we have an interesting story to tell and still had fun. All the frustration, money and time spent traveling still gave us another new experience in England!
FIGHT NIGHT!
HARDY! England's favorite-the crowd erupted when he came out!
