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As the title says... This trip was The Unplanned London Trip... The trip planning and execution was wrong at so many different levels, London put everything back in place so it did have a "Happy Ending".
My wife and I are avid travelers and we decided to pen down our travels. This trip to London gets to be the lucky one to get blogged for the first time.
Travel Planning: This is officially the worst part of the trip for me. When we get or plan to take a few days off, the conversations begin with "Where do we go?". This decision is usually made by airline tickets for us. So we got our tickets to Scotland about a month before the travel and started researching about Scotland. However due to personal reasons, we had to cancel our trip. Tickets to Scotland shot up and we rescheduled our tickets to "London".
The Travel: Considering we canceled our tickets to Scotland 6 hours before travel, we were very iffy about whether or not we would be on the flight to London. But we made it and boy, are we glad.
We reached
London on Thursday night. We had to struggle to get to the hotel because we landed pretty late (around midnight) and the shuttle buses stopped operating by then. We took a taxi, went to Airport Marriott and voila, as they say, when something has to go wrong, it will! It was the wrong "Airport Marriott", we booked at "Airport Marriott" that wasn't apparently close to the airport. It was about 30 minutes from Airport. We took a cab there and called it a day!!
Day 2 - Friday: We rented a car early morning and started driving towards
Stonehenge. Something that my wife and I had on our list for a very long time. Glad, we checked it off this time. It was a chilly winter morning with a little bit of sunshine and it was beautifully green. We took a little detour on the motorway and stopped for breakfast and coffee. Finally we reached Stonehenge around 9:30AM. The pre-historic monument was nice, one of the most complex of Bronze Age monuments. It was impressive how fresh those rocks looked after centuries. Interesting trivia, while we were there we found out that the site could have been a burial
site.
From Stonehenge we drove to
Henley on Thames. We didn't take the traditional Motorway and started driving on the backroads. It was serene, we kept stopping every few kilometers to take photographs of the greenery. While at Henley on Thames, we walked next to the river for an hour, spent time in the park there, had a nice warm cup of coffee in what seemed like chilly winter afternoon. Around 1PM, we left for Windsor Castle.
We struggled to find parking. We spent over couple hours in
Windsor Castle, the longest occupied palace in Europe. Then we started driving back to drop the rental car off. After dropping the rental car, we took a shuttle to the airport and a train to Woolwich to meet our friend.
We had dinner together at his place and called it a day at local hotel, which was booked and paid for by him, one of the many sweetest gestures from him.
Day 3 - Saturday: Days 3 & 4 were reserved for London City and the best way to cover London City is on foot and we did just that. We took the famous Hop-on-Hop-off from Marble Arch and we recommend anyone going to London to do this. You can cover so much more with this. We first went to Buckingham Palace, from there we covered a host of things such as London Eye, Big Ben, Tower of London, London Bridge, Tower Bridge. Considering the long historic association England had with India, we had to cover Tower of London and we could relate to so much history there in the one museum it was indeed wonderful.
We ended the day with dinner at First Indian Restaurant in London called Punjab Restaurant. We met the owners and learnt so much about how they operated the restaurant especially their attempt at maintaining authenticity of Indian food.
Day 4 - Sunday: Continuation of London City. Our friend was the host today and we covered Kensington Palace, Harrods, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square, Canary Wharf. We recommend ending the day with Dinner at Canary Wharf. You get a good view of the true financial capital of the world.
Day 5 - Monday: We had an early morning flight back home and this is how we ended our trip.
All in all, it was a wonderful trip! We were so tired after reaching home, it took us a few days to recover from all the walking. For fitness freaks - our fitbit tracked over 25,000 steps each day!
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