Today was almost a disaster.

It started off on the wrong foot when we discovered that our favorite little coffee shop is closed on the weekends. It picked up when we walked by later and the owner was there with the door open only because he was roasting coffee and we walked off with free coffee and free hot chocolate. I'm not completely sure if the rest of the day went up, or down, from there.

Our intention was to head to the Tall Ships Festival in Greenwich. The information online seemed straightforward enough--get a ticket at one of the Thames Clipper Piers and head to Greenwich. How hard could it be, right? Well, something that should have taken about 30 minutes, ended up taking over 2 hours and more than 8 miles of walking.

The pier we chose as our starting point turned out to be closed, lucky for us there was a nice couple that was heading to the same place and let us follow them to the next pier. There, we discovered that it would be at least an hour before we could get on one of the ships, but our new friends, Ian and Clare said they'd be heading down on the DLR if we wanted to go that route, which we decided to do. Unfortunately, we were enjoying our conversations so much we missed the stop to switch trains.  They were horrified that they'd dragged us to the wrong place until we discovered the stop we'd landed at was also part of the festival. Only problem? It was the red-headed step-child part of the festival in a fairly run down, very industrial part of town.

We set off towards Greenwich, where things were supposed to be a little more festive and it was only (or so we were told) about a mile walk. Several miles,  some wrong turns, dead ends, a really sketchy neighborhood, a bus ride and another mile of walking and we finally found the festival and the stupid, frigging tall ships.

By 3:30 (only 2 1/2 hours after starting off on this adventure) we were sitting on a grassy hill enjoying some cheeseburgers and some well deserved pints (ice cream for the girls). We got to meet some of Ian and Clare's friends and there were even some kids for Ella and Julia to run around with. Despite the fact that it was not at all what we'd expected, today ended up being really nice. And exhausting.

Cheers!
Libby