Day 2 London Saturday 21st December 2013:

This morning after having a great sleep I was feeling rested and ready for another day of exploring London.

To start the day I met my friend Jessica from Perth at 10 am,who had arrived in London this morning. We had made plans to meet up in London prior to leaving Australia.

Jessica and myself had been talking for about 9 months on Facebook after meeting on the Contiki Meet Ups.

Contiki Meet Ups was similar to a Facebook Group where you could find and chat to all the people who had signed up for your trip (which unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore.)

We met up and decided to have lunch together so we went for a short walk and found Caffe Nero a short walk from the Royal National Hotel.

This was a great little Cafe with a wide selection of coffee, sandwiches, pastries and juices. It was so great to connect with someone I had been chatting to for all this time!

We got to chatting about our lives back in Australia and all our hopes and dreams of what we were wanting to experience on Contiki and Europe!

After lunch we explored London and bought some souvenirs before heading back to the Royal National Hotel where Jessica checked into her room at 2pm.

I went and did some shopping for last minute essentials for the trip and also found Travelex a currency exchange service to take out some euros for the start of the trip.

I met back up with Jessica at 5pm and we headed down to the Contiki Basement for our Kick Start Meeting.

The kick-start meeting is where we met our whole group for the first time, as well as our Trip Manager.

Our Trip Manager gave us an overview of how things work on Contiki: including a health and safety briefing, as well as informing us where we needed to meet the following morning to depart.

Once we had met everyone, a group of us decided to have dinner at the London Pub to get to know everyone that we would be spending the next 12 days with.

After dinner the group of us did a shop for snacks and water at Tesco’s.

We then headed back to the hotel to be to have a good night sleep and to be rested as we were departing at 7:30 am the following morning.

Safe Travels! Campbell 🙂