Christmas Day

Hello friends and family! After spending a while getting photos on this blog, I've finally sent all of you the link so you can see what we've been doing since you last heard from us. As I said in my introductory post, I'm hoping to add new photos each day so you're up-to-date on our adventures in this huge playground of a city. The posts will probably make the most sense if you start at my first post ("YVR-LHR") and work up from there, but where you go from here is up to you...

Last night we talked about what we were going to do today for Christmas. Our yummy dinner was all planned, but what should we do during the day, when practically everything was shut for Christmas? We decided to go to Richmond Park to see some of the 650 deer that roam the park. We figured out how to get there and were excited about our plans, but then I flipped through a brochure I had picked up at some point during our tube journeys, Travel Information for the Festive Season, which informed me that there wouldn't be any tube, bus, light rail, tramlink, riverboat, or national rail service on Christmas Day. We were stunned, since it had never occurred to us that all public transportation would shut down. We would be, in effect, stranded in our neighbourhood. So, one change of plan later and we walked over to

to see our neighbourhood deer instead.

After our Christmas dinner of roast lemon chicken, new potatoes, parsnips, carrots, and brussel/s sprouts (the sprouts on the branch are SO sweet and delicious); and our dessert of Christmas pudding, drizzled with double-cream, and dotted with my hard-won blackberries, we sat down for some Christmas-Day Scrabble.

In case you're wondering, I lost 353 to 402. Not fair, considering I made dinner!