Autumn School Break Trip to England
[Photos from 26-31 October 2016, posted online 10 January 2017. Upcoming worktrip is going to kill these updates for a while.]
For this year’s autumn school break (no school Thursday and Friday), we decided to hop on over to England to visit Gunnar granddad, and his gang, as it had been a while.
To kill two birds with one stone, Finnur left the weekend before so he could get a full work-week at Google in London (while staying at dad’s), and we then joined Finnur there late on Wednesday. We hung out for a few days, and then all of us flew back on the Sunday.
(Due to crazy scheduling issues, Finnur slept at home for one night, and then left for California the next day, for two weeks. Eek!) (39 images total)
Wednesday 26 October 2016
Excitement as the kids and I prepare to board the plane to Gatwick.
Yup, that’s an airplane all right!
A few moments before, Bjarki had made himself comfortable on the bus from the terminal to the plane.
Emma is getting easier to travel with. This time I came armed with quite a few TV shows pre-loaded on a tablet for her.
Goodbye windy Iceland! There was so much headwind driving to the airport, that we drained more than half the car-battery. It was not great to know that we would have to charge the car before driving back to town on Sunday.
The kids almost killed me walking from the airplane, as they were in such a hurry, and my Achilles tendon was in a bad place. But we made it through in one piece. (Next time I’ll have to remember to take the damn elevator to get down, and not take the long ramp down!)
Waiting for granddad to pick us up!
Thursday 27 October 2016
Emma enjoying twirling in the park, while granddad looks on.
Shirley resting her busted knee. She was scheduled to have a knee-replacement operation a few days later.
One of the Pokestops in the park.
Lots of flight-trails!
Bjarki by another Pokestop. This was the park where we discovered the GPS on his phone was broken, which is why he was having such a hard time hunting Pokemons!
Friday 28 October 2016
Anna requested that we go up to London to hunt Pokemons. Here she is in London, after the hour-long train-trip from Gillingham.
Google has just moved into a new place in London. We were a little lost…
Grrr! Figures!!
Ok, take two!
Hey, look who we found!
Cool post-it art! Notice the high-up bridge? We crossed that thing later.
We were already pretty high up!
One must always eat lunch at Google!
After lunch, we crossed the up-high-bridge to enter this cafe.
Out on the balcony.
Google growing its own spices.
The view! That circular thing is Kings Cross station, and the long hangar-like building is the St. Pancras train station where we had arrived from Gillingham.
Back inside, by the coffee making part of the cafe. At this point we said goodbye to Finnur, and walked off to hunt Pokemon.
It soon became apparent that there was some event going on in Pokemon-land, which meant we kept seeing the same Pokemon over and over, which got old pretty fast.
We kept on walking though, until we found Hend House, also known as the location of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in London, where…
… Signý (my brother Pétur’s wife) is currently working!! We hung out with her for a little while, most notably visiting a very nerdy store, Forbidden Planet, around the corner, before she had to get back to work.
We kept moving for a little bit, but we were rapidly running out of juice.
We found a cafe to sit down in, and had nice stuff to eat.
Cute decorations!
We started making our way back to St. Pancras around five, of course hitting peak underground traffic. The trains just hung out at the platform instead of moving right along like usual. We got home in the end though!
Saturday 29 October 2016
Younger siblings actually being nice to each other for two seconds.
Granddad surveying his backyard.
Anthony had told us the Strand was rich in Pokestops, so there we went, and it was!
I took Emma to the park while everybody else was watching football.
High up!
Sunday 30 October 2016
Back at the airport, time to go home!
Awww, Icelandair. What a cute plane you have!
That was the end of our short trip to England. We did manage to refill the car fairly quickly before heading back into town, but found out we could have skipped doing so, because the same kind of wind was still blowing. The big difference: This time it blew us home!
The next day Finnur got right back on a plane, this time flying all the way to San Francisco!!
