WorldTravelReynolds

Bottlenose dolphin – 3 builders, 84 hours and 22,601 bricks. Bluefin Tuna – 1 builder, 68 hours and 7,603 bricks

Beside each animal is a description on how long it took to build it and how many bricks and a little tidbit of information about that animal. It was pretty cool! We did make it to IKEA. When we first arrived in Croydon, Chuck broke the plastic ice cube tray so we have been looking all over for one like it.

African Lion- 3 builders, 400 hours and 50,642 bricks.

Ice is just not used here much at all so it has been very difficult to locate one. If you remember the small silicone trays in Spain that we thought were candy molds, well, they are what IKEA sells as ice trays. So, we decided not to purchase them. IKEA was pretty much the same as in the USA.

Orangutan- 2 builders, 180 hours and 49,450 bricks.

Just a few European differences. We looked all over for the hot dogs (Chuck loves them!) but finally decided on the fish and chips. Upon leaving, Chuck said, the hot dogs were usually located in the same area as the checkout. Well, guess what? He was right! Too late to get one this day! We’ll have to walk back over there to get him his IKEA hot dog and Lingonberry drink. 

Giant Panda- 2 builders, 206 hours and 62,350 bricks.

While walking back to our home, we decided to look for a “European Walmart”. We think it is called Asda here. On our route to Asda, we walked through another shopping center and found a home store. We decided to wander in and voila, we found some silicone ice cube trays! Success! We bought two. One to leave here to replace the one Chuck broke and one to take with us to make sure we have ice everywhere! Needless to say, we didn’t make it to Asda. Maybe on our next walking trip around town we’ll try to visit and see what their rollback deals consist of.

IKEA

This eatery is called “The Box Park”. There are about 20 different restaurants but their space is about 600 square feet. There a multitude of picnic tables in the middle for sharing or some restaurants had a few tables in their areas. The music was very loud and there was also a game area for kids. A nice area next to the train station.

For much of our trip the first year, we have the housing booked and deposits paid, which in many cases is 1/2 the rental but we couldn’t book airfare/transportation out a year in advance so we devised a plan to make those at least 90 days in advance. So far we are doing good. We keep an eye on airfare deals because some of the flights are pretty expensive and long. We have Dubai to Bali, a 9 hour flight, Bali to Australia, a 6 hour flight and Australia to Panama, a 24 hour trip. There are no non-stops from Australia to Panama that I can find so far. And of course these long overseas flights aren’t cheap either so we are going to use some of our credit card miles to pay for some. This will help quite a bit on our budget.

We have planned to be back in London Thursday and Saturday and to Brighton Beach (way south) on Monday. The weather at the beach is in the upper 70’s so it should be a nice day. Its a 45 minute train ride and about a mile walk to the beach. The round trip train tickets were 32 pounds for both of us. That’s the most we’ve paid for a single train trip but we really want to go to the beach!