Advertisement
Published: December 26th 2015
Edit Blog Post
Biggest smile of the trip!
Well maybe it was bigger smile at the Turkish Hammam I booked our return flight home with a 23 hour layover in London, as neither of us had been there previously and what better way to see it than by a "free" long layover. It was surely a whirlwind tour, but we are used to that. As Dennis likes to say our trips are just "Go Go Go" with little time for any rest or relaxation, except what we manage to get riding a bus, train, plane etc. In my opinion we do enough of resting on our weekends at home so when I'm on vacation I want to pack in as much as I can and see everything possible before it's over.
We arrived in London late afternoon, after more delays, checked into the Curzon Hotel ($53) in Kensington which provided us easy and quick access to the subway and the central London tourist areas and also back to the airport. We walked to Hyde Park from our hotel, which was having a huge Christmas fair complete with roller coasters, arts and crafts stands, and countless food and mulled wine stands...so far we were in love with London...we love mulled wine!
It was lightly misting rain since we
arrived but it soon started to pour and we got soaking wet and freezing cold even with rain jackets on...then we hated London. We had dinner in a pub near Buckingham palace where we had some incredible fish and chips...in love again. Incidentally dinner was one of the most expensive we have ever eaten out, and we quickly learned that London is not for the budget traveler in any way. I had toyed with the idea of visiting the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, however the admission prices were so exorbitant ($22-30 each respectively) so I shelved that idea and decided when we returned and had more time it would make more sense being as we only had about 3 1/2 hours for sightseeing in the morning.
The next morning we managed to see all the major sights that we had set out to see before we had to head back to the airport at 1100...Big Ben, House of Parliament, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, and strolling along the River Thames.
With that we headed back to Heathrow Airport and closed out this trip. All in all we ended up
visiting 6 countries this trip, spanning 3 continents and experienced a huge array of climate zones while striding where some of the greatest historical figures and societies this world has ever known have been. Our only regret for this trip was that we just didn't have enough of time, as always. We look forward to returning many of these places another day, until then we will have to cherish our memories of the places and people we had seen.
I have earned my free companion airfare status for Southwest Airlines for 2016 so Dennis can fly free where ever ever I go, so we will be traveling more or less locally in the US and Caribbean and wherever Southwest flies, much to the happiness of our families.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ―
Terry Pratchett
Advertisement
Tot: 0.178s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 17; qc: 74; dbt: 0.099s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb