So we arrived at Euston Station at about 4pm yesterday afternoon. The train ride was pleasant enough and we caught a cute little taxi cab to our hotel. After a little drama with bookings, vouchers and inexperienced staff we found our way up to our room and settled in. At about 5pm we met up with Mum's good friend Van, who she stayed with in Brighton before we met up with her in Scotland. Van and her husband Grant had arranged for us all to go to a interesting Israli restaurant called Ottolenghi where we shared a collection of tapa style dishes. The food was nice and rich and was fun to share. We finished of with a delicious cup of hot chocolate before they kindly escorted us back to our hotel and caught the bus back south to Brighton. It was nice to catch up with them over their side of the world.
We got up at a reasonable hour this
morning and had a nice buffet breakfast at the hotel. We met a tour operator
from Trafalgar (our tour company) who briefed us on what to expect when we
start tomorrow (at 3.45am - cringe). Once we were sorted we headed out to
navigate the tube to Green Park where we met up with Amanda (One of the stars
from our Ireland leg decided to make a cameo appearance for our day in London).
We to a quick walk through the park to the famous Buckingham Palace where
we fought valiantly with other tourists to get a good picture in front of the
gates. It was fun and the memorial outside is pretty impressive.
We didn’t hang around there too long as we had some much to see and only
one day to see it in. So we walked back through the park and headed east to
Piccadilly Circus. While it’s Time’s Square, Piccadilly Circus was fun and the
older building certainly gave it some Character.
From Piccadilly Circus we headed through Leicester
Square, past the Shakespeare Memorial through to Trafalgar Square. We had some
fun climbing on the Lions (and watching other slightly less nimble middle aged
women try to climb on the lion’s too – it was … memorable). We continued South
West to the Parliament Building where we spent some time looking at Big Ben
(see what I did there, Big Ben – Time) and checking out the outside of
Westminster Abbey (no we didn’t pay the £18.00 fee to go for a look inside –
there was too much else to see).
From there we got back on the Train and
headed east to see the Tower Bridge and the Famous Tower of London. We stopped
for a late lunch at a little café that had a fantastic view looking out on both
and gave our legs a rest from all the walking. Once we were sufficiently fed,
hydrated and rested we went for a quick walk around the outside of the Tower
and onto the bridge to get a better look at this really impressive structure.
It would have been really interesting to go for a look inside but with such
little time we really wouldn’t have been able to do it justice – so we
continued on.
We got back on the tube and headed West
again to Knightsbridge to have a “quick” look through Harrods. What an
incredible shop – we spent up large and managed to… err I mean we looked up
large as we really couldn’t afford pretty much anything in the place. It was
fun to look around though, we especially enjoyed taking a look through the
homeware section, the kids toy’s (well, I say kids toys but the toy cars were
worth more than some fully road worthy cars at a tidy price of €60k). We must
have been there for a couple of hours before our feet told us they had well and
truly had enough and demanded that we begin making our way back to our hotel
for a bit of a rest.
In the evening we hit up the local restaurants at Islington (okay it was a Chinese Buffet but it was good since we only had a small lunch) and then took the tube down to the Waterloo Bridge as our cab driver had tipped us off that this was the best place to get photo's of the London Skyline. Unfortunately our photo's turned out a little blurry but it was pretty impressive to see.
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