Day Eleven - Greenwich Observatory and the Cabinet War Rooms

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This morning we were lazy and called a cab to take us to Greenwich. We were splitting the cost with a friend, and it came to around £27 . We wanted to get Greenwich fairly quickly, so the river was out and there seemed to be lots of work going on around the DLR and other lines around Greenwich, so cab it was.



It was my second visit to the Royal Observatory and I enjoyed it just as much this time. We spent some time there and then walked back down to the river to purchase tickets for the City Cruises cruise back to town. Again we got to use a 2-4-1 offer for this. I loved the City Cruise tour last time and found the commentators to be very amusing as well as knowledgeable. This time there was no commentary whatsoever from Greenwich to the Tower which was very disappointing. We had to change boats at the Tower due to a high tide, and there was a commentator on the second boat, but it was a very half hearted commentary without any real enthusiasm. I understand that they are not tour guides, but I still think that if City Cruises are advertising commentaries onboard there should be one and the person chosen to do it should try to make it interesting.



We stopped at St Stephen’s Tavern for lunch. A cute little pub but the food was just so-so. We then spent the afternoon wandering around St. James’ Park, looking at Buckingham Palace, the Mall, Trafalgar Square. We managed a quick stop at the National Gallery, but my two teens were pretty full of art after Paris and didn’t have a lot of interest. That is the downside of family travel!



We finished off at the Cabinet War Rooms (again 2-4-1). This was really interesting until we actually got into the Churchill Museum which all got a bit confusing. We had spent some time at Churchill’s grave in Bladon during our Oxford stay, so the kids were quite interested in his life and the war.





We had dinner at Locale at County Hall as it was only five minutes walk from our hotel. Fairly good lasagne and a nice bottle of red finished the day off well.

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