Well, needless to say, we made it safely to England! I kind of freaked out on the takeoff from Pittsburgh, but that flight was actually cool - we flew around downtown Chicago and got to see everything from the air. Awesome. The 7.5 hour flight was pretty uneventful except for about about 15 minutes of turbulence. Not bad!

Liverpool was pretty glorious. I'm posting three of the pictures I took. One of them is me by the river Mersey on Thursday afternoon after Colin and I had our lovely picnic lunch. I had fun feeding the pigeons, even though I probably shouldn't have. The second one is of me, Colin, Ashleigh, and Martin, taken tonight at the Prellies show here in London. I'll get to that in a minute though. The third is me taking my own picture in front of Brian Epstein's grave in Liverpool.

I'm going to try to keep this post short because it's after 3 am here in London, and we're all still up talking and having fun. But a few of the highlights of Liverpool for me: EVERYTHING! The people are so genuine, and so so nice. I melt when they call me "love" (haha). I really enjoyed the John/Paul house tour, and the Magical Mystery Tour. And, Christine, we did make it out to spend some time with Brian! That'll be a whole story in and of itself. I loved Mathew Street and especially the Cavern Club.. so AMAZING. And we were definitely spoiled at the Brian Epstein hostel.. our own room, bathroom, teapot and flatscreen TV!

It made me so incredibly sad to leave it this (Saturday) afternoon, and I still sort of miss it. For me, Liverpool has left some really big shoes for any other city to fill. I had such high expectations for the city and it surpassed all of them. I definitely want to go back sooner rather than later, and for a longer time. Even though I saw a LOT, I feel like I could always see more. It's such a wonderful place.

Now we're in London. The train ride was really nice, expect we got sort of turned around in Birmingham (it was a quick fix though). We saw some lovely English countryside and Wembley Stadium. When we got into the station (Marylebone, where the Beatles filmed the opening sequence of 'A Hard Day's Night'), my friend Ashleigh was there to meet us and took us back to her place to shower before going to a show by her boyfriend Martin's band.

We had a great time at the show and ate a dinner of "sausages and mash," very traditional. And very good! British food has a bad rap in America. Anyway, after the show, we had to get a cab back to South London where Ashleigh and Martin live. Ashleigh was talking to the cab driver (Edward) and convinced him to take us on a tour of central London for free on the way home. Haha! It was SO pretty and full of people (Picadilly Circus = Times Square). We also got to see Big Ben and the houses of Parliament from a distance, as well as the London Eye. Can't wait to explore more!

Well, like I said, it's after 3 am. I miss all of you, but I'm having a great time in England. For those of you I promised to call, I will call soon! Bloody phone cards... We love reading your comments and guestbook entries though, so keep 'em coming and we'll keep posting whenever we can!!