Happy Thanksgiving from London, England

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone back home!

I’m not sure what your family traditions are when it comes to Thanksgiving, but growing up we always did a turkey and a ham dinner at my nanny and papa’s place.  That’s changed over the last 12 years as grandkids grow up and move away and get lives of their own, but I won’t even try to deny the fact that I miss my family Thanksgiving dinners, a lot.

Last year I cooked a small turkey and all the fixings for a friend and I, and I had full intension on doing the same this year for Gina and I, but we got sidetracked yesterday doing the tourist thing and today doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving to us because we’re both working and everything is going as normal here in London.  So this is how we spent our Thanksgiving Sunday…

For the first time in a few weeks it was a really nice day sitting at 20 degrees and NOT RAINING, so we decided to go for a  walk and see what Hyde Park was all about.

Hyde Park is beautiful! It’s huge and there’s a lot to see.  We walked around for a bit, looking at ducks, swans, people (people watching is THE BEST!) and took it all in.

After walking for about an hour, my back and hips started to get really sore.  This is something that’s been happening quite a bit since I’ve been over here. I’m not sure if it’s the weather or all the walking that we do, but my back and hips seize up and cause me an immense amount of pain.  I’ve dealt with daily pain since my motorcycle accident but not to this extent.  So after taking a break and sitting for about 10 minutes, we decided to try and rent bikes and see if we could see some more of the park.

There are bike stations set up all over that city that let you rent pedal bikes for VERY cheap.  If you only bike for 30 minutes, it’s free.  It’s pretty sweet deal.  We wanted to take advantage of this and we tried for about 20 minutes to get one of the damned bikes but for some reason we couldn’t get one.  The station wasn’t working properly, so we couldn’t.

Damn bikes.

After touring around for a bit longer, we did some shopping in some of the higher-end stores in London.  We hit up Harrods and some other big name places, that I can’t remember because it was all such a blur, and realized that we didn’t want to spend over £300 on sneakers (this is what we were shopping for and yes, I saw a pair of DG men’s sneakers on sale for £350 ).

We ended up going to Lacoste and getting some SWEET new kicks (not high-end, but not cheap either)

We shopped for a few hours and decided we weren’t going to have time for me to make a turkey dinner like we had planned, so we put our brains together and tried to figure out where/how we wanted to do Thanksgiving dinner…

After thinking long and hard, we realized there was only one place we could go for Thanksgiving dinner…

The Hard Rock Cafe

For beer and burgers; One of the best Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever had.  Not really, but it sure was tasty!

And the scenery was amazing!

This definitely isn’t a typical Canadian Thanksgiving, but we had a great day and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  I’m now off to the gym to try and get rid of that 10lbs burger I ate yesterday.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!