Our first amazing trip to the USA infected us with the travel bug. We’d had a taste of the world beyond our shores and we were keen for more. However, it was to be nearly 2 years before we could travel again and this time we were headed for a brand new continent ( to us!) – Europe.
The first germ of the idea was to use our frequent flyer points to book a couple of tickets to London for Neil and I and to pay for Liam and Erin. My first idea was to keep it simple – 10 or 12 days in London with a couple of day trips to surrounding countryside. However, Neil’s
Scottish heritage could not be denied and he was emphatic that he could not visit the UK and NOT go to Scotland. So the range ( and the time) of the trip grew in our plans to encompass more of the UK. Then we were reminded that Paris was only a couple of hours away from London by train….you get the picture…
The first 6 nights were spent in London. I had booked us into an apartment and justified the extra cost by cooking our meals for the whole week. We arrived at Heathrow, bleary eyed, on Good Friday and had a
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| The view from our apartment |
wonderful lucky break when we were upgraded to the penthouse. It sounds much fancier than the reality – the apartment was clean but decorated in “1970’s tired”…but it had an amazing view over the rooftops of Bloomsbury – we could see the British Museum, the roof of St Pauls cathedral and Big Ben from our verandah. I was in heaven.
In a whirlwind week we did ALL the things that a first time visitor to London does – and we loved every minute of it. I cannot imagine any rational human being NOT loving London! We did the classic hop-on, hop-off bus tour and battled the massive crowds in London at Easter. We walked down Whitehall and visited the
Cabinet War Rooms. These were just
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| Downing Street |
fantastic. You climb down stairs into the original bunker, and visit the map rooms and bedrooms, dining quarters etc in exactly the same state that they were in when the doors were closed out in 1945. There is also a marvelous museum devoted entirely to Winston Churchill – very clever exhibits that even managed to keep Liam enthralled for a long time.
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| The kids walking towards Admiralty Arch |
Not too sure about the statue of Queen Victoria out the front – do you think she was permanently bad tempered or did all the sculptors and painters just manage to get her when she was having a bad day? The only statue I’ve seen of her with something other than a grumpy face was the one of her and Albert in the Portrait Gallery. ( In that one she was simpering up at him with an expression of mindless worship – mayby grumpy is better after all? ) We walked and walked and walked – up the Mall through Admiralty Arch ( and past the statue of Captain Cook) to Trafalgar Square and the galleries there.
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| A walk through Bloomsbury |
Erin and I also enjoyed a tour of the Tate Modern. Erin thought the exterior was pretty ugly but admitted that you couldn’t expect too much from an ex-Power Station. The inside is extraordinary – the “Turbine Room” is an enormous empty space which played host to Perspex tubes spiraling up three stories high – I believe these are a work of art but they also act as really cool slippery slides – there were long queues of people waiting for a turn to whiz down.
and their contents!) were cool.
From there we made a reasonably thorough tour of the Greek and Roman galleries. Erin was in her HSC year and had been studying Ancient History so she was really tickled to find several items which they have studied in class. The Parthenon galleries were amazing, and we did finally get a close look at the Rosetta Stone.
made a rapid right-turn to try the Victoria and Albert instead. Walked straight in there – obviously the average Easter crowd are more interested in dinosaurs than iconic design. I enjoyed the iconic design from the ancient to the modern that is on display at the V & A. After the V & A we split up and Neil and Liam headed off down the line to Putney Bridge for the footy. They had a wonderful afternoon and I know that an afternoon spent amongst a classic English soccer crowd was an absolute highlight for Neil. In this short video that he recorded you can hear the crowd singing …
Neil would argue that there was one other Museum we visited that outclassed all the others…the museum at Lords Cricket Ground!
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| Lords Cricket Ground |
spacey Media centre before finishing in, you guessed it, the shop!
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| Easter crowds at the Abbey |
St Pauls Cathedral – Wow! What an incredibly, stunningly beautiful structure. I felt awed in Westminster because of its age and its history but I really think St Pauls beats Westminster hands down for beauty. Erin, Liam and I climbed the stairs to the Whispering Gallery. We tested the theory that a whisper on one side can be heard on the other but unfortunately there were at least 40 other people trying to do the same things
so Erin didn’t hear my whispered – “Erin…can you hear me???” Climbed down again and my knees were quivering for hours afterwards, there’s no way that I could have made the climb to the very top.
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| Heading for Hogwarts… |
Kings Cross Station is so magnificent it almost qualifies as a castle – there we found Platform 9 3/4 and took a photo of Liam pushing a trolley through the brick wall – that will mean absolutely nothing to you if you haven’t read Harry Potter. However, for the fans, it’s a major London sight – there were several people lining up to do the same thing.
A few years later (2011)we returned to London for a couple of days as part of another trip. This time just myself and the boys. I’ll write about this journey in another post but, in brief, the entire holiday had a distinctly military theme so almost out first stop in London was a morning at the National War Museum. My menfolk were in heaven, surrounded by tanks, cannons and displays relating to so many of the conflicts that The UK has been a part of. Particularly interesting was the “Blitz Experience – where you had a (very) small taste of what the East End of London endured for over 100 nights in 1940. Another haunting section of the museum is devoted to the history of the holocaust – that one was a bit too much for Liam and nearly too much for me!
Our 2011 trip had extraordinary timing – we came “this close” to being able to view the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. We did see all the preparations and the decorations but unfortunately ( or the boys would probably say, fortunately) we had to fly out the day before the wedding! The city was beautifully dressed for the occasion with Union Jack bunting strung along all the major streets…and porta-loos scattered throughout the parks! There were keen people camped out for days in advance along the wedding route , particularly in front of Westminster Abbey – so it certainly showed us a different side to London than we had seen on our previous visit.
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| Buckingham Palace and the Mall dressed for a wedding! |
of 2 nights to Paris. The Eurostar really does make a couple of days in Paris a feasible option from London.
hotel we also had our first taste of TINY European hotel room. I should have
guessed when we tried to get into the lift , quite literally, it took one person plus bag at a time so the kids went up in shifts and Neil did a couple of trips up the stairs with the other bags. After we first saw the room I went back down to the desk to say I thought they’d made a mistake. There was only a double and single bed in our clean and attractive ( but tiny) room. There was no mistake, the fourth bed was a pullout that was underneath the single! By the time we were all in with the bags we needed to take turns to move around – Liam was a bit horrified but the rest of us couldn’t stop giggling.
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| Notre Dame |
It was a whirlwind couple of days in Paris. Neil and I walked for miles that first evening ( while the kids relaxed in the hotel room) we walked straight down to the Tuileries Gardens ( about 5 minutes walk) and couldn’t stop grinning when we spotted the Eiffel Tower and then the
Louvre and then the Champs Elysees and the Arc de Triumph.
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| At Versailles |
We left the room in a state of chaos and rushed down with wet hair and empty stomachs ( no breakfast!) to join the tour. I would NOT recommend it as a good way to start the day 🙁
Our tours were fantastic ( we used a company called Paris Trip). In the morning we were taken on an orientation tour of Paris with stops at Notre Dame, Invalides and the Eiffel Tower where we enjoyed a wonderful lunch at level 51 restaurant – sipping a cocktail and gazing down to the river from the tower was definitely one of those “pinch me I’m dreaming!” moments. After lunch we headed out of the city to visit Versailles.Louis IV really did build a nice little place for
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| Walking by the Seine |
himself didn’t he!!! We were gobsmacked as we walked from grand salon to the next grand salon, they just seemed to get more and more opulent as we went along!
On our second day we walked for MILES! The Louvre ( naturally!) was followed by St Chapelle and then another visit to Notre Dame cathedral – with a light lunch of tasty baguettes in the cathedral garden . On that trip I was interested to see how different all the cathedrals are – Notre Dame seems so solid and heavy and quite dark but still majestic, whereas Westminster was soaring and St Pauls just so light and airy and
simply beautiful. From Notre Dame we crossed to the Left bank and headed back along the river to visit the Musee Dorsay – it’s a long walk and our feet were really sore by the end of it. The Musee D’Orsay was a real change of pace and a great finish to our time on Paris.
The Eurostar whisked us back to the UK where Neil and I planned to travel further afield to get in touch with our ancestors. The USA may be our first-favourite country to visit but I can say that the UK is right up there with the big-boys for me. I’ve writen about our journeys (to-date) in those lovely Isles in another post – for really, the rest of the UK really does deserve a post of its own 🙂