I really hope you love this stroller...

This is Lincoln doing this post:

We brought a double stroller with us to England that I thought was a really good stroller.  It was a sit and stand stroller, so Livvy could sit or stand in it, and Jude's car seat latched right on to it, which was nice.  It had overhead covers that protected the kids from rain and also a little storage basket on the bottom.  It was a little long since one kid sat in front of the other and at times could be a little difficult to maneuver.  But it was also sturdy and overall seemed like a great stroller to me.  However, London is not the most kid friendly place and many Tube stations do not have elevators which makes it very difficult to get around when pushing 2 kids in a stroller.  

However, once we got to England, we noticed that the double strollers here are quite a bit different.  Rather than having one kid in front of the other and being quite long, the kids sit side by side and so are quite wide.  They also have these plastic rain covers that protect the kids from the wind and rain better than the cover our stroller had.  Anyways, Vindie seemed to think that somehow having one of these strollers would make London more child friendly and change her life.

I had heard similar stroller talk before.  Probably a year or so ago, Vindie told me that she needed a double jogger stroller so that she could go running (she couldn't use the double we already had).  We paid $70 for one at a garage sale, Vindie used it like 3x, and then we sold it for like $30 when we moved to the UK.  Gotta love buying high and selling low.  I could envision something similar happening in the UK.

Anyways, even though I thought a Maclaren stroller (UK stroller Vindie wanted) was a little better than what we had, I didn't think it was that much better and definitely not worth the hassle of selling our stroller and buying a new one.  However, a guy randomly asked Vindie about buying our stroller at the grocery store and Vindie found a reasonably priced Maclaren on Gumtree.com (similar to Craigslist), so I finally gave in.

Vindie arranged with the woman selling the Maclaren for me to come pick it up one evening at 7:00 after work at her house.  Vindie sent me Google Maps instructions of how to get there and acted as if it should be no big deal.  I just had to take a bus and then walk about 3/4 of a mile or so.  

I hopped on a bus near where I work in Central London and rode it for about 30 minutes to the stop where I was supposed to get off.  I hopped off, took one look around me, and then immediately wanted to jump back on the bus, but by then the bus had taken off.  Let's just say that it was probably one of the worst neighborhoods I had ever seen in my life (yup Vince, even worse than Concord if you can imagine that).  I was the only white person around, which does not always indicate a bad neighborhood, but in this case it did.  It was already dark, there were a bunch of thugs loitering around, and here I was dressed in business casual and carrying my laptop bag.  Vindie had sent me to the London ghetto.

Well, I immediately started looking for a non-hooligan looking person to ask where I could get on a bus that would take me to the Tube, home, or anywhere else that wasn't there.  I finally found a woman who gave me directions.  After walking for a little while in the direction she pointed me, I realized that I was actually pretty close to the house I was looking for.  I decided that if it was this important to Vindie and if I was already so close, I might as well go buy the stroller.

I finally found the house and knocked.  A Pakistani woman with her head covered came and looked at me through the glass in the door before turning around and leaving without  saying anything.  I knocked again louder this time and she returned and told me through the door that her daughter (the person selling the stroller) was not home yet and that I would have to wait for her outside.  Well, I waited about 15 minutes and then a man approached the home.  He was the brother of the woman selling the stroller.  Anyways, he also left me outside for a while but then I guess felt bad leaving me out in the cold in the ghetto and so invited me in.  He talked to me about the exciting sport of Cricket for 30 minutes until his sister arrived and I could purchase the stroller.

Walking back the way I had come through the Compton of London pushing an empty double stroller (it was pretty heavy so I didn't want to carry it and I didn't know how to fold it up anyways) and carrying my work bag was a memory I would like to forget.  You should have seen the looks I got from these street punks.  They either looked at me like I was crazy or suspiciously as if I had just stolen a stroller from an innocent mother pushing her kids around.  Lucky for me, they didn't think a stroller was worth stealing.  

Anyways, I finally got to the right bus stop in ghettoville.  I had to wait there for about 20 min for my bus to come.  Another bus stopped even though nobody was getting on or off and the bus driver opened the door and asked me where my kids were as if I had decided to take them for a stroll through Richmond and had not realized that I had forgotten them.  Anyways, my bus finally pulled up and to my dismay it was one of the small single story buses and it was packed with culturally diverse people.  I still didn't know how to fold up the stroller, and so the only place wide enough for me to fit my stroller was at the front.  That meant that every time anyone got on or off the bus during my 30 min ride they had to literally climb over my stroller.  I still got some judging looks but nobody said anything.  I was so tired and frazzled at that point that I probably would have screamed at the slightest provocation.  Anyways, I finally made it to the tube, rode it to our stop, and then walked home.  I walked in the door and told Vindie that I really hoped she loved this stroller.

...

This husband is glad that he didn't die.