The countdown has begun!

Oh my god there is only four days to go till we leave for London. It has been a rather stressful week, Icelandic volcanoes are certainly not helping the situation. Why does a volcano with a name that looks like a cat walked across a keyboard have to erupt now! Thankfully the latest news is that it has started to ease and we shouldn't be affected. Its been a bit mad trying to figure out what is left to organise and do. I have been told I am being a bit over zealous with making labelled snap lock bags for the various chargers we are bringing. Oh well.

Anyway I thought I would include a brief run down though of what we will be up to while we are away:

We leave New Zealand on Tuesday the 31st and arrive in London on Wednesday the 1st at 6am. We are doing a bike tour the first day and meeting up with an old friend of Richards for dinner.
Thursday we have plans to see the tower of London (already have tickets) and various other attractions in the area.
Friday we are heading out of London and doing a day trip to Stonehenge, Bath and Windsor castle.
Saturday we are also heading out of London to Brighton to see Richards great Aunt and to nosey at the famous pier.
Sunday we are planning to go to the British museum and take our pick of what ever else takes our fancy that day. Its then change of hotel time as our tour starts on monday morning.
The tour we are doing is by Cosmos, a subsidiary of Globus.

The map shows the route we will be taking and how many nights we are spending in each place. As you can see its a pretty full on tour, but hopefully will be fantastic as we get to see so many different things. When we were booking our tour we had a list of all the places we wanted to see and went from there. It did end up being the most expensive one (naturally!) but we figured we may only get to do it once so may as well make the most of it.

We get back to London on the 2nd of July. We head out to Cardiff the next morning to meet up with Richard's cousin who will be showing us around the area where his dad grew up. We then head to Warrington in England that afternoon to stay with Richard's aunt.
The next day we head to Manchester to do a tour of the Man United stadium. Something Richard was really keen on doing, and since we have to go through there anyway to get to Edinburgh we thought why not.
We then spend three nights in Edinburgh, taking in the sights of the city and doing a day trip up to the Highlands.
Its back to London on the 7th of July, we fly out that night at 9pm.

Its been a heck of a lot of planning and shuffling and reorganising and more shuffling to get this itinerary sorted. There is so much we want to see and do, we just simply don't have the time to do all of it. It has taken a lot of compromise on both sides to get to a point where we are both happy with what we plan to do. Hopefully it will all work out, we are certainly well organised (well at least I am!).