Venice be where the Hillbilly and his family are at. Left London this morning after visiting the old bird for a week and tomorrow, we leave for our next destination for the week. I'll try to act humble while you browse through the website. Note that all of this is relative to when I'm typing this (June 23, 2007) because there be no knowledge of Internet where we are now. Hope the hotel we go to tomorrow has one somewhere because I'm starting to get the shakes.

The London portion of our trip is fairly routine in that Cabbage and I come here every year at this time for work. It was getting so routine, in fact, that we had to bring the young'un with us this year just to shake things up a bit.

The hotel we were in while in London is one I've come to love. Uncharacteristically large rooms and exceptional staff. The bathrooms include a bathtub and separate shower with five nozzles which is a source of unending fun with Syd (and, I'm guessing, the cleaning staff who has to deal with our room afterward). It also boasts the largest free-standing marble staircase in the world, which proves my theory that everyone can be the best at something if you add enough qualifiers.

Sights seen to date: Buckingham Palace ("Look, Daddy, I can wave like the queen"), London Eye ("It would have been better if it went faster"), Tower of London ("Henry the Eighth was an angry king"), The Lion King ("Daddy must have been a young warthog once too") and Madame Tussaud's (gallery of wax figures notable for having the coolest activity we've seen so far - immortalizing your hand in wax).

We also took a double-decker bus tour which gave us nice family-friendly tidbits of information like the fact that King Charles I had his head cut off for treason but they had to sew it back on because they forgot they had no decent portrait of him. There were a number of clarifications I had to make for that for Syd:

  • No, he didn't come back to life when his head got sewed back on
  • This happened a long time ago, not last week. They don't cut people's heads off now, we're much more civilised
  • What's treason? Why that's when you don't finish your vegetables at dinner, of course.

Syd has unabashedly declared this her best vacation ever, praise which I'll temper by saying she has inherited her dad's memory so there's a good chance it's the only one she remembers. Still, she's had a perpetual smile on her face ever since arriving so maybe there's something to it. It may sound sweet but you weren't the one listening to her sing, "He' gorgeous! He's Teddy! He's gorgeous! He's Teddy!" to her Hamley's teddy bear last night for forty-five minutes. And now that I've typed that out, the &*%$# song is stuck in my head again.

Here's hoping the fine folks at Google Maps have carefully researched tomorrow's destination because it does NOT look easy to get to.