London! Day 5

Today was our first big road trip--to Liverpool! We woke up early and made the 4 hour drive over to Anfield, one of the oldest football pitches around. Bryan (and his brother Scott) are big Liverpool FC fans, so we needed to go check it out. Again, we took tons of pics today (I will be making a flickr page with all of them sometime soon) but here are just a few snapshots. We took a tour of the stadium, and got to see the areas where the players locker room was, as well as the trip out to the pitch--it's tradition to hit this sign on the way out, so of course we had to keep up with tradition:







Got to sit in the press room as well which was neat!


One note about Liverpool, if you're ever on route to go visit Anfield-- do NOT judge this city by, well, most of the area around Anfield. If you added a few hundred zombies, it would be the absolute scariest, best backdrop for the scariest movie I've ever seen. Everything is run down, closed, burns, and falling apart. And by everything, I mean it. I think we only saw a handfull of people the whole time; and they looked pretty unfriendly. No bueno. Convinced we didn't drive 4 hours only for the field, Bryan had convinced me to explore... after finding the 'city center', I still wasn't convinced. Business parks. Scariness. Huge amounts of not-what-we-were-used-to-so-far-on-this-trip ordinary areas. And then we went for a walk, where we discovered how wrong I had been... about a solid hour of Bryan and I with our jaws dropped; Liverpool is filled with CRAZY amounts of landmarks, very giant and interesting-looking history museums, and possibly the largest church I've ever seen in my life-- (Seriously. This thing appears in the fog like a mountain. Sorry for the corniness, there is absolutely no way to describe how large this was:)



Here was the 'bombed out church', a cathedral which had been attacked during WW2 (completely filled with plants, and today also a couple practicing tai chi):


After that, we stumbled across a HUGE city center/outdoor shopping area (we got lost, a beautiful mix of NYC and London-- we didn't have nearly enough time to see it all.) Here's another snapshot of just another 'random' beautiful building-- there are so many of these things here they are pawning them off as student housing and such. Man. Crazy, I say.



Again, surprisingly overwhelmed by how amazing things are here. The day started out with a bit of football history and a super sketchy town-- and ended with figuring out how we could make our way back here one day. We bring the car back tomorrow-- and will miss it! Bryan has taken very well to driving on the left side (much to me fussing over everything, because it's very difficult to get used to at first-- even just sitting and watching! You get that jumpy feeling every time you turn a corner...) So Bryan-- THANK YOU FOR DRIVING!