Day Nine - Arriving in London

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We spent our last morning in Oxford having a final walk around before being collected by our driver for the trip to London. We could have easily caught the train as I did on my last trip, but with four of us and far too much luggage it was much easier to be driven. The price was not greatly more than four train tickets and the journey was much easier!



We arrived at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge at around midday. We were luckily able to check in early, but wasted a bit of time by being given the wrong room and needing to move.



We ate a quick lunch in the Italian cafe, Espressamente, in the hotel lobby, before heading out to Waterloo to purchase our paper travel cards. I think we walked in the wrong direction as it seemed to take ages to get there down a very unappealing street! Luckily I had printed out all the 2-4-1 offers we wanted as there were none available at Waterloo. We purchased our travel cards and returned to the hotel by a much quicker route.



We used our first 2-4-1 having a ride on the London Eye. That was my second time on the Eye and I can’t say I am a great fan, but the family wanted to do it. London doesn’t seem to me to be the most attractive city to view from a height. Interestingly, some friends from Australia went to ride it the next day to find it closed for a few weeks for maintenance. There was absolutely no mention of this while we were there on Friday afternoon so we were lucky to be able to ride it at all.



We then tried to find somewhere for us to eat dinner, and went into a couple of nearby pubs. There I found out that we couldn’t take our 17 year old son into a pub after 6.00pm. After months of being on the Trip Advisor forum and being in the UK last year, this was the first time I had heard of this! We decided to head to Covent Garden by bus as our daughter was meeting friends there. We had a bit of a walk around Covent Garden and found an Italian restaurant named Tuttons right at the bus stop so had some dinner there. It was quite expensive but the food was very good.



We caught the bus back and sat in the hotel bar for a bit listening to the band.

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