3/25: first full day in london
Enjoyed the blessed morning of sleeping in and strolled over to the Starbucks for a couple coffees while Kate snoozed. Ran up to Hyde park again for the run, and found good stretches of dirt to ease the legs on. In terms of European cities that I’ve been to (admittedly somewhat limited), Hyde park blows all the other green spaces out the window. I’d say it rivals Golden gate park in San Francisco in terms of size. Looped most of, then on a whim looped over to green park off the nw corner for a quick look at Buckingham Palace. The weather is luckily similar to Minnesota, so we're not really giving up spring, just enjoying it somewhere else.
After some solid research, I found out that you could get half off many of London’s sites with a train ticket entering London that day. I also found that you could take the train to the Kew Gardens which we were looking at doing that day. So we booked a 1 way train ticket to Richmond, and ended up paying only ~12$ each at the gardens. Not bad.
The gardens were nice to wander around in. There wasn’t a ton in bloom, and it didn’t look as manicured as the kerkounhoff in Holland, but there were lots of things to look at and plenty of interactive items to enjoy. They had a “tree top” walk, a human sized badger den, a Japanese garden, and a stump obstacle course to navigate.
We returned to London with another one way to take advantage of the half off deals in the city. It took a little while to get to the Tower of London from Waterloo (which was cool to see from the Bourne identity scene), but we’re got there with almost an hour and a half to check things out. The ticket lady tried to dissuade us from purchasing, saying they suggested three hours, but I honestly wouldn’t want much more than the time we had. It’s cool to look at the Crown Jewels and the armor, but not really my deal. I liked walking the grounds though and imaging a time when this was a refuge from attacks, or their own people. Man- the jewels were sure unnecessarily decadent though. It’s amazing people didn’t rise up sooner.
We wanted a eye trip with our last half off for the day, but thought we had until 8 and thus wandered into a pub a few blocks from the tower. The walrus and the carpenter was another classic pub to enjoy the afternoon. They had 6 cask ales alone along with another 8 taps. The calamari left something to be desired, but went down well enough.
We yelped a pizza place across the London bridge in southwark for dinner. Good, not great brick fired pizza, although the ambience was good and the negroni solid.
Back to the tube to Waterloo one more time and a trip to the eye. Turns out though, the eye is only open until 8:30 on the weekends, and otherwise closes at 6. Way off. Oh well, I’d probably do it the same if I had another chance.
Walked back across the Thames to an apparently loser Westminster stop and walked some more to the Victoria station, then home. A good day of trekking around the great city of London.
After some solid research, I found out that you could get half off many of London’s sites with a train ticket entering London that day. I also found that you could take the train to the Kew Gardens which we were looking at doing that day. So we booked a 1 way train ticket to Richmond, and ended up paying only ~12$ each at the gardens. Not bad.
The gardens were nice to wander around in. There wasn’t a ton in bloom, and it didn’t look as manicured as the kerkounhoff in Holland, but there were lots of things to look at and plenty of interactive items to enjoy. They had a “tree top” walk, a human sized badger den, a Japanese garden, and a stump obstacle course to navigate.
We returned to London with another one way to take advantage of the half off deals in the city. It took a little while to get to the Tower of London from Waterloo (which was cool to see from the Bourne identity scene), but we’re got there with almost an hour and a half to check things out. The ticket lady tried to dissuade us from purchasing, saying they suggested three hours, but I honestly wouldn’t want much more than the time we had. It’s cool to look at the Crown Jewels and the armor, but not really my deal. I liked walking the grounds though and imaging a time when this was a refuge from attacks, or their own people. Man- the jewels were sure unnecessarily decadent though. It’s amazing people didn’t rise up sooner.
We wanted a eye trip with our last half off for the day, but thought we had until 8 and thus wandered into a pub a few blocks from the tower. The walrus and the carpenter was another classic pub to enjoy the afternoon. They had 6 cask ales alone along with another 8 taps. The calamari left something to be desired, but went down well enough.
We yelped a pizza place across the London bridge in southwark for dinner. Good, not great brick fired pizza, although the ambience was good and the negroni solid.
Back to the tube to Waterloo one more time and a trip to the eye. Turns out though, the eye is only open until 8:30 on the weekends, and otherwise closes at 6. Way off. Oh well, I’d probably do it the same if I had another chance.
Walked back across the Thames to an apparently loser Westminster stop and walked some more to the Victoria station, then home. A good day of trekking around the great city of London.
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