Thanks, everyone.
We flew out of Denver the morning after the crash. Can you believe an article about the crash is
already on Wikipedia?
We had large delays in Chicago because it was so cold there and our plane was unable to take on water because it had frozen solid in the trucks.
We flew into Heathrow and took a taxi to Reading because we rented our car there (since there weren't any rental cars in Heathrow) and then we drove on to Bath and saw Stonehenge on the way. We saw Kew Gardens and the area around it on the next day and actually found winter boots that fit our daughter's feet. They were expensive but we bought them anyway since it is nearly impossible to find shoes that comfortably fit her because she has large bunions on both her feet. She loved the boots and wore them for the rest of our trip.
We drove into downtown London on Christmas Eve and saw many things there including Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Harrods, the London Eye, the British National Museum, and our hotel in Piccadilly, which upgraded us to the most fabulous room. It had a sitting room as well as a bedroom and a huge bay window overlooking the street in front of the hotel. The hotel also had a large swimming pool, which thrilled our daughter, and we had to take her swimming. Our daughter wondered how Santa could possibly come visit her in the hotel room if we didn't have a tree and I forgot to bring a miniature tree with us, so I suggested that she draw a tree and she did. Fortunately my husband and I did remember to bring several Christmas presents for her in our suitcases, so Santa was able to visit her in the hotel room, after all. I have already explained all about Santa to her, but I wonder if part of her still thinks he is a real person. We parked the car in a garage and mostly walked around or took taxis for the rest of the time we were there until we checked out of our hotel and left for Edinburgh.
We drove from London to Edinburgh on Boxing Day and the next day we saw Holyrood House and walked up the hill at the Royal Park across the street. The view from there was spectacular and the weather was fine. We walked up to Edinburgh Castle and saw the inside of that and bought a plastic crown for our daughter that resembled Mary, Queen of Scots' crown and a book in their gift shop, and we also bought souvenirs in the stores along the Royal Mile. We didn't try haggis, though. We had pasta at an Italian restaurant instead. There was a restaurant that had both macaroni and cheese and haggis on their menu posted outside, but when we entered, a woman approached us and said that the restaurant was not licensed for children, so we had to leave and find one that was.
We drove from Edinburgh back to London and saw Rosslin Chapel and Hadrian's Wall along the way before it got too dark.
We had expected to see a toll booth where we could pay the 8 pound toll for driving into London, but there wasn't one, so we didn't know how to pay it. We thought that maybe they took the license plate numbers with the cameras which seem to be everywhere and sent bills and the car rental company would just add it to our bill, but we found out on the last day that wasn't the case and fortunately we figured out how to pay the toll over the phone with a credit card and didn't have to pay a huge penalty in addition to the toll, just a small one.
I found the people in England and Scotland very nice (except for a few of the drivers*) but I found the prices in England and Scotland expensive compared to the US. For example, I saw a book with a price in pounds that was more than the price in dollars here. I think that the cover price was 29.99 pounds in England and it's $22.99 here and I bought the book for $13.49 at Costco before we left.
*There was one crazy driver of an orange delivery truck for a work clothes rental company who repeatedly and deliberately kept cutting my husband off on the M1. My husband did not cut him off or anything and he was driving the speed limit. After my husband figured out that the driver was doing it deliberately, he slowed down until the crazy driver got tired of driving so slowly just to keep messing with him. By the way, the TomTom I bought for my husband last Christmas worked very well at mapping out routes for us. It warned us about the many speed cameras and it actually mooed if we exceeded the speed limit by more than a few miles per hour.
