Down the Rabbit Hole: Wednesday March 2nd

Today was our first full day “across the pond” as Mike P. would say. We are currently in Guildford, England, about forty minutes outside of London. This is the very place that yours truly spent most of her childhood…. Jenny. If you thought for even a split second we were talking about Kelly, you obviously have never met us and in which case we will ask the question, why are you reading our blog? Hmm…weird. I guess you can stay anonymous blog reader, but don’t try anything funny.

Ok back to today.... We decided not to set alarms, since we needed to catch up on some sleep. Well Kelly stumbled into Jenny’s room at what Jenny assumed was about 8am… in fact it was half past noon. Woops! Still feeling like we could sleep for another 12 hours, we hopped up for a delicious bowl of Shreddies and showered (we feel like this is worth mentioning since it has been more than a few blog posts since our last bathing experiences- don’t judge). We let our excitement to skip around town take over our jet lagged bodies and we headed out to catch a bus. Well we missed one bus and walked around here for a few moments. The hunt for “Skips” had begun. Jenny has a few favorite foods from England and #1 in her heart are a chip called Skips… well, so far no luck. Sue doesn’t have any in the house (and hasn’t in a long while) and the nearby gas station had none! This is all very discouraging, but we will continue our search! (it also doubles as yet another captivating story line for you loyal followers…we know you are on the edge of your seats with this one).

A little insert from Jenny on this one…

Seriously they cannot have stopped making Skips! First of all, they are delicious – and secondly they are always right next to the Hula Hoops (which are my sister’s favorite). I have already had to say goodbye to my other favorite discontinued snack, the gone but not forgotten crunchy M&M, ugh, tragic. I refuse to allow Skips to face the same terrible fate! Hey English rellies, if any of you know anything about Skips please comment! Thanks :)

Ookay, now back to this riveting blog post.
We caught up to another bus...almost (after dodging some traffic - Kelly is still getting ahold of which way to look first when crossing the street). We managed to miss this bus also, nevermind, we were in a great mood and obviously weren't trying very hard to catch these buses anyway. When we did get on a bus we realized we had NO cash, a few dollars and some colones jingled in our purses but we were pretty sure these wouldn't get us far. We explained to the bus driver, who closely resembled father time, but with a shorter beard and a bit more well fed, and he rolled his eyes and said hop on. Hooray! Not many public transit people will go out of their way for you- we knew we had got lucky with Father Time. About ten minutes later (and 7 or 8 school children drop offs) we were in downtown Guildford. The High Street is the place to be down here, so we wandered up and up, stopping in lots of cute shops. We picked up a few things and then headed into a super cute little coffee shop for a warm drink and snack. Afterwards we strolled down some side streets; we saw St. Mary’s church-where people have worshiped for over 1000 years and Lewis Carroll’s funeral was held, found a cool pub with live music on Thursday evenings, and then we stopped in Debenhams to buy hats and gloves (R.I.P. tans we worked so hard on). We each found hats (gloves tomorrow). We scoped out the local nighttime scene and headed to the bus station. We had to wait a while, but we caught the last bus back! Sue was already making another delicious dinner by then which is more glorious than we can possibly describe here. So the four of us sat down with delicious chicken, butternut squash, green beans and potatoes (veggies yay!). Our meal was of course followed by some delicious pastry dessert- cream puff balls and fruit covered in chocolate sauce and cream (will need to walk long and far tomorrow to make up for this one). We were oh so content. Evan called their and the Foster’s other friends, the Foleys, to meet us for a drink. We walked up the road to the Jolly Farmer for our first British pint (well, Kelly’s first, not so much Jenny’s). HBB was the local pick for the evening. Not bad at all! The 6 of us sat around chatting; the moms in shock of how much Jenny resembles her mom in every way and what all the kids are up too, while Kelly learned about the Guildford Round Table and explained Kentucky and Bourbon to the dads. We had a great time! Jenny and Kelly decided it was a perfect time to pop in the hot tub…which was at the end of Sue and Evans garden and turned out to be less of a warm adventure than we had hoped since it was freezing outside! Jet lag kept us up until about 2:30am, not great for our plan of waking up at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Oh well, we are enjoying this homey part of our trip to relax, catch up on sleep, and have a little calm before the storm that will be hostel-hopping in who-knows-where that we will head to next.