London Part 1

London Part 1

So of course on our first day in London the kids got up at 4.30am and by 5am we were out of the house as they were getting mighty noisy and let's face it, nobody wants to be woken at that time. As we were staying at Tufnell Park, we were able to wander towards Camden. It was lovely to watch London wake up with a gentle beautiful light. However, the sight of a family of 5 wandering the streets of north London got a few strange looks. The kids were actually quite good about walking up the high street looking in the shop windows. We found a brilliant old school Greasy Spoon Cafe. It was straight from the 1950s. Seriously, it looked like it had last been painted for the Queen's coronation. Brilliant

Fancy a cuppa guvna?

It was actually a really lovely way to reacquaint ourselves with London. The only problem was we had 2 and a half hours to fill as London doesn't do breakfast. So the earliest time any place we could grab a coffee was 7.30am.

By 7am and 2 hours of walking we'd had enough and caught a bus back to Rani's house. Some members of the house were up and let us in so we could raid the fridge. I have to say Rani and Graeme are possibly the most generous people on earth and gave us the run of their house and more particularly, the coffee machine. We can't thank them enough.

So refuelled we headed out again with charged up Oyster cards. You know the ones, where you just touch your card as you get on the bus or in the train station turnstile and it just works, much like Myki doesn't. They've had theirs for over 10 years. We could have had that system but apparently our public transport system is more complicated than London's!

Anyhoo, we decided that double decker buses were the way to go so we could get a much better view of the city than the Tube, especially at the front up the top.

We caught a bus that went through Trafalgar Square then on to Westminster where we got off and walked back past Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament or HP (hence HP sauce) and Big Ben or Big Finley as Finley calls it.

The Fam with Big Finley

Crossing Westminster Bridge

We stopped by the Thames and looked at Big Ben as it chimed 12 times. Wonderful. Then we sauntered off to have a little rest beside Boudika (apparently not Boadicea).