London, England

In September 2017 Dan and I embarked on a three week trip to the United Kingdom, starting in London, and making stops in Salisbury, Bath, Cardiff, Oxford, Stratford-Upon-Avon, York, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. We had an ambitious itinerary for the amount of time we were there, but our excitement and desire to see as much as possible kept us going, and we squeezed as much as we could into every day. We took so many pictures, wanting to capture everything, and it took me weeks afterwards to sort through the nearly 3000 photographs, editing, deleting, organizing, backing up, and filing them all. In the meantime, we were back on the road, and so it’s taken me a while to finally get around to posting the blog entries of our UK adventure.

I’m starting with London, our first stop, and our longest stay. We flew out of San Francisco on September 11 and arrived at Heathrow airport about 12 hours later, got a rudimentary lesson on using the subway, and found our way to our room. We spent six nights in a tiny IKEA style flat near Hyde Park that perfectly met our needs. We had basic kitchen facilities, a bed and a bathroom, and barely enough room to turn around, but it was clean and bright, walking distance to stores, and the Tube (subway), which made it easy to get to all the places we wanted to tour.

Over the next six days we visited Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, and made several trips to Hyde Park. We rode the Tube everyday and became quite good at navigating the routes. We walked through Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abby, and Saint Peter’s Cathedral. We saw the Tower Bridge, and walked across London Bridge. We took the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tours and saw Parliament and Big Ben, China Town, the River Thames, and many more points of interest, too numerous to list. We spent many hours inside the British Museum and the National Galleries. On our various walking tours we visited the Sherlock Holmes Museum, Kensington Palace, Twinings Tea, frequented a number of pubs, and shopped at the famous Harrods Department Store.

It was a good first visit to this world famous city! We met lovely, helpful people along the way, and had fun engaging with the locals, and just immersing ourselves into the mix of things. In no particular order, here are some London pictures capturing the highlights of the first six days of our trip.