Finally figured out the London Underground and although the system is very extensive and seems to be efficient, it uses the dreaded Zones to determine pricing. And boy does the Underground love it's zones.. so much that there are an insane 9 of them! I feel really bad for the poor people that live in Zone 9 and commute in to Zone 1. Basically the more zones you travel across the more you pay, but the problem is trying to figure out how much that is and which stations are in which zones.

To avoid pay for individual tickets everyday, we bought 7 day Travel Cards for zones 1-3.. at a station in zone 4! The ticket machines only gave us that option, brilliant. So we went up to the window and asked the attendant whether we could add zone 4 to our passes or pay an additional fare to use the Tube. After an extremely exaggerated sigh, he informed us that we can't do that but that we could cancel our passes and buy new ones.. only we'd lose about £15 on each pass (that we just bought 30 seconds ago) once we cancelled… Ok, so can we walk to the nearest station in zone 3 as we are on the edge of the zones? Sure, it's 45 minutes away… We finally worked out a bus that would take us to that station and was covered by our passes.

Oh and the Underground ticket machines or attendants did not accept any of our US credit cards (which worked everywhere else), so make sure you have lbs of Pounds on hand to buy your week long passes. Ours (zone 1-3) were around £35 each.

Once again the next day we ended up at another Tube station that was in Zone 4. We've now learned our lesson and will always check the station's zone before going there. Oh and make sure you don't accidentally travel on the Tube to a station in a zone you don't have access to, as you need to scan your card when exiting the station as well as entering and you won't be able to exit the station if your card doesn't cover that Zone. Good times, really fun for visitors and if you don't read English you're totally out of luck.