Sunday 28th June - London City

Arrived @ Heathrow today, and managed to go out to dinner with
Celina's family, but not much morethan that, promptly fell into bed and
for some unknown reason awoke at 5am this morning. Had a quick
breakfast, then caught the tube to Marylebone, where we set out for the
trek to Casa del Reenie/Bei.

45 seconds later we arrived, marvelling at the location of their pad.
Once we got inside, I was even more impressed, this place is huge by
London standards. They are on to really good thing with this place. We
unfortunately were an hour early, and rudely awoke poor Reenie from
slumber, but she was still one of the best hosts we have ever had, to
the point of providing us with keys and a map! This is better than most
of the hotels we have stayed at!

Since we were meeting up with Kenny anyway, we left Reenie's place
fairly swiftly to allow her to get some more rest, although looking at
the feast she provided later in the day I think she just got straight
into the food preparation. More on that shortly. We met up with Kenny in
the cinema district around Picadilly Circus, unfortnately he couldn't
stick around as he had to drive the 6 hours back home. Gee we've got
some good friends. We spent around 4 hours just chatting and catching up
which was great fun.

On the way back to the tube, it started raining, which threatened to put
a kybosh on the proposed picnic in Regents Park, which we had been
greatly looking forward to. We got back to the apartment, scared the
crap out of Reenie by standing in front of the door just as she was
opening it (sorry :)), picked up our umbrellas, and then realised that
the rain had stopped. Seizing the moment, we made a dash for the park to
find any cover we possibly could, just in case the rain returned. Which
it did, several times throughout the afternoon, at sporadic intervals,
luckily for us however we had managed to find some reasonably dense
foliage under which we could take refuge.

The afternoon was great fun and absolutely flew by, thanks so much to
Reenie primarily for organising and providing a massive amount of food and
drink, thanks also to Stu, Yve, Naan, Liz, Sarah, Suze, Kate, Simon, and
Warren for taking time out to come and catch up with us at the picnic.

Had some drinks at the "Volunteer" across the road, which my cousin
Sally attended, great to see her again after however many years it's
been. She has been living in London for a couple of years now, but
before that was in Melbourne, so it's stil been a while.

By around 10:30 it was getting to matchsticks under eyelids time again,
so we retired back to the apartment, and once again fell into bed and
straight to sleep. I slept for a while, but that's pretty boring so I'll
end this blog entry here.

Have been having issues getting workable offline blogging setup going, but I think I'm onto it now, so hopefully future entries will be more timely.

Addendum – for members of my family and other pedants, "This is better
than most of the hotels at which we have stayed".