The weather outside is Frightful...

Today was an interesting day.  We set out on the 189 to go to Brent Cross Shopping Centre.  When we left the house it was lightly snowing, but nothing that either Cory or I expected to impact our journey.  Brent Cross is about 5 miles north of us so it's a little outside of Central London.  It's a traditional mall so it seemed like a better idea than walking through the sludge and wet roads on Oxford street.  We made it there with no problems and went straight to Pizza Hut for lunch.  Mid lunch we hear an announcement, "Brent Cross will be closing at 1pm due to extreme weather conditions".  Ok, so now we're thinking we rode the bus for 45 minutes to eat Pizza Hut.  If only that was the whole story.

Continue eating, next announcement, "All buses will discontinue service at 1:30pm."   We finish lunch and head outside to find ourselves with at least 250 other people waiting for buses, traffic backed up and not moving at all and to top it off it's snowing outside.  We made a judgement call to walk to the Holiday Inn that we could see in the distance.  We get to the Holiday Inn and find more stranded people.  At this point I seriously was hoping that the Holiday Inn had rooms as the buses were suspended, we couldn't get a taxi service to answer our calls and I certainly was not walking 5 miles in the snow, pushing a stroller, wearing my non-waterproof Uggs.

A little luck came our way and the hotel had a complimentary shuttle that would take us to the nearest tube station.  Cory arranged the shuttle, but I didn't realize he hadn't told the guy we were not guests and I blurted out in the car that we had made a bad decision to go to the shopping centre.  Woops, I guess I let the cat out of the bag that we were not hotel guests.  I remedied the situation by giving him a very nice tip.  I knew that everything was ok when the man says, "Thank you so much, very generous, thank you!". 

The tube line we were dropped off at is about the least convenient tube line to get back to our house.  We didn't care.  At least we were heading the right general direction.  A couple of transfers, all seemed to be going smoothly until we got to Baker street and the Jubilee line (tube line to our house) was apparently so severely delayed that it had been sitting at a stand still for over 20 mins.  At this point, walking could have been an option, but an undesirable option.  We decided to head above ground, check out the situation and drop into some tourist shops since we got no shopping done at the mall. 

Did a little shopping, Brady's now sound asleep, and headed back underground.  Trains seemed to be running again so we FINALLY made it home.

3 hours
4 inches of snow

£7.20 in fares

1 pair of ruined Ugg boots
1 sleeping toddler oblivious to the predicament

The feeling of stepping back in your flat after a miserable day = Priceless.

I need to remind myself that it could be worse.  Our friend Tina was flying back to the US today and spent 9 hours on the tarmac before her flight was cancelled.  I cannot even imagine.