London, UK

by Lauren Stebbingsupdated on June 3, 2019June 3, 201954 Comments

Read Time:5 Minute, 24 Second

Hi everyone! Long time no see!

As promised, I am still continuing my posts about my various trips while abroad. However, I was too busy traveling and going to school while I was in Europe that I didn’t have much time to sit down and write a bunch of blog posts. So here I am, about a month after being home from Europe writing a post about a trip I took in January. Luckily, these trips were so fun and memorable that it won’t be hard to write about them. So I am genuinely sorry if these bore you, or if the outfits in these posts don’t really go with a summer vibe. I am more so doing this as kind of a journal AND to show you guys all of the cool places I went to so you can use these posts as a guide to Europe, if you ever decided to travel there! (Which you most definitely should FYI) Or you can use them as a good laugh because let me tell ya, these trips were full of trial and error.

Soph and I took jumping pictures every place we traveled to
Maggie and I cheesin

Speaking of trial and error, to start off, my trip to London was FULL of those. Although it was probably one of my favorite trips, we roughed it and I mean ROUGHED it. When we first landed in London, it was about midnight. Our phones were all almost dead and we had no idea where we were going. So we basically just hopped on a train, until shortly after we realized we were going in the opposite direction of the city. (Shoutout to the random man who saw us struggling and told us that we were completely wrong and directionally challenged. ) We ended up hopping off the train at the next stop to catch another train…that we missed by just a few minutes. Just our luck! 🙂 At this point it was 1 am and the station was closed, all outdoors, and it was snowing! There we were, three girls (Sophia, Maggie, and I) our phones were at 5% and we were in the middle of a foreign city; every mother’s worst nightmare. Eventually we found an empty train with chargers that went in the right direction this time.

One hour train and a taxi ride later and we made it to the hostel; at that point we were exhausted to the point that we laughed at everything, including our bad luck. We laughed even harder when we truly realized how much we were about to rough it in our home for the next three days. Lets just say paying a little extra for an AirBnb or a smaller hostel is the way to go, but of course we decided to go with the cheapest option and booked a 12 person hostel. The guy to girl ratio was basically 90% guys and 10% girls, and for the first half of the trip the three of us were that 10% ratio of girls. Now just imagine three girls staying in a room full of guys, that reeked of B.O. and feet… with communal bathrooms. Yikes. Not to mention, our first night in London we didn’t make it to our hostel until about 2 am, so we had to walk into this pitch black room with our flashlights on and of course with our luck, the first thing we hit with the flashlight was a kid in his whitey-tighty underwear climbing into bed. Double yikes.

The next day we decided to book a hop on hop off bus, and guess what? It was pouring rain the WHOLE time. Guess where we sat? The very top of the bus. Not only were we soaked, but we decided to buy cheap umbrellas that had “LONDON” written all over them… yeah, we were THOSE tourists. We sat on the bus for a while and checked out the city from there, and also made our way to the London Bridge by where our hostel was. That night we found a random restaurant by the water, drank some wine, then got ready for our night out with Sophia’s friend from London, Paul, and his friends.

That night, we met some girls in our hostel, one was 21 and from Paris, and one was 18 from Canada, both traveling by themselves. We decided to invite them to come to a rooftop bar with us and and the boys. We had just met these girls about 15 minutes before we decided to invite them, so we had a blast getting to know them while at the top of the Gherkin.

We had fancy drinks that were way outside our price range and laughed as we pretended to have British accents while our new British friends pretended to have American accents. Although hilarious, it made me realize how nasally our American accents are… gross!!

From there we found ourselves all over the place, from Mackies (AKA McDonalds) to our hostel bar singing karaoke. If this story now doesn’t already tell you how wack some of our luck is, you can probably imagine how interesting the rest of our night was. Let’s just say the next morning we were cracking up because of the turn of events that happened the night before. What happens in London stays in London 😉

The next day we made our way to Buckingham Palace where we had tea with the Queen!!

HAHA SIKE. I wish.

We went to go see the Changing of the Guard but of course they decided not to have it the day we came… figures. After that we roamed around the city. We had lunch near Westminster Abbey, Big Ben (who was under construction), and went to Platform 9 3/4. At one point we were chasing our bus down because we didn’t get to the bus stop in time, we literally ran after the bus screaming “Stop!!”. I have never run faster in my life lol.

After that workout we ended the day with a ride on the London Eye at sunset. Beautiful is an understatement.

Ultimately, the trip was a blast and full of laughs! I honestly don’t think I have ever laughed so much in my life, and it was all because of Soph and Mags. If you’re reading this, I love you both!! 😉