Moving day

Today we left our Air BnB to move to the home of one of Grahams friends while he is away. It is very kind of him, and also rather brave to let our family of 7 come and stay in his home that usually homes 2! It didn’t go according to plan. Graham was out quite late last night with people from work which meant that he couldn’t help with the move this morning. In effect that meant that I had 5 kids and a truck load of bags across two taxis trying to get across London. I did manage to load 3 kids and a fair portion of the bags in a taxi. After that point it seemed impossible for me to flag a taxi. The couple of drivers I did speak to said that they wouldn’t be back in time for the their next job if they took us, or that they were already booked for their next job. After 45 mins trying, and conscious that I had 3 kids sitting with bags on the side of the road somewhere, I booked a taxi online but needed to add a phone number (I don’t have a number just data) and added Grahams. Unfortunately Graham was in a meeting and didn’t take the call to confirm. He subsequently did speak to them and managed to persuade them of the need and eventually a taxi came, … after more than an hour of trying in central London! The taxi driver did say that Wednesdays were quite notorious and also it would have been about the time people were leaving hotels in the area to head to the Ashes..he suggested booking a day beforehand if we need a taxi on Wednesday morning again. When we found the other children, unloaded, and disembarked, we realised we were still a little distance from the location… but in the end we managed to haul the bags all the way up the street and up the 3 flights of stairs, and now there is no more moving for 5 days! And hopefully next time we will have Graham to help as well.
The day was not all lost. After a fair bit of cajoling, and a trip to KFC, we headed into the British Museum which in the end we quite enjoyed. We even managed to catch up with Graham and head down to the Thames for dinner and walked home via Westminster.