Surviving London

I bought my wife a European vacation for her birthday a few months ago. She’s always been an Anglophile, and I thought, what better way to celebrate her 40th birthday than to give her a week in London with the family.

In all honesty, I had no idea what to get her for her birthday. I’ve held this one as a trump card for some time now.

Anyway, she loved it. And last week we finally all got to go to London!

What an epic trip.

We had been there about a day when we decided to see Westminster Abbey and ride the London Eye. We had tickets to the Eye, so we figured we’d make an early afternoon of it by seeing the Abbey, Big Ben, Parliament and whatnot. They are all in the same area so it was, all in all, a good plan.

Sure. A good plan.

As you probably know, there was a terrorist attack in London on Westminster Bridge on March 22, 2017. This was the same day that we were on the bridge. In fact, the picture above was taken about 20 minutes before the attack happened. We had just gotten off the bridge, ate a quick lunch and were about to get our tickets to the Eye when  things started going tits up.

As we approached the ticket office, the people inside waved us away and started locking the doors and people started to be evacuated from the building surrounding us. Crowds started to form and there was a general consensus of “What the fuck?”

My wife, at this point, jumped into full on reporter mode, grabbed the camera and began shooting video. Of everything. She began to report live on Facebook and start contacting her multiple sources in the news industry, all of whom wanted her to do live updates on their stations.

It was a busy few hours. I could do nothing but make sure our little girl was safe and watch in awe as my media savvy wife jumped back into her reporting shoes.

She documented more of the day here. Give it a read.

It was incredible, really. Very surreal to think about us being there basically at ground zero during an international incident like that.

Needless to say, the gravity of the incident didn’t really sink in until we were safe back in our hotel room. What just happened? It dawned on us that if we were delayed even by a few minutes on the bridge we could have been considerably less lucky than we were…

Sobering.

We decided that the attack would not taint the rest of the trip. We still were able to see most of everything we wanted.

Never got back on the Eye, though. Because of the incident, thousands of ticketholders were impacted and they were never able to re-reserve our tickets…

We saw so much more later in the week. Time permitting, I’ll try to grab the images off our camera and update accordingly.

Still a bit jet lagged now and recovering from a cold. More soon!