Many months ago, in the dead of winter, B mentioned to me that during June, he would have to take a work trip to Paris for WordCamp Europe. B travels quite a bit for work, and I always stay home with the dog. Teacher vacations are pretty much set in stone and our schedules aren’t exactly flexible. But this time…it was during summer vacation.
Paris and London have been at the top of my travel list for some time now. In high school (the 90’s) I would listen obsessively to Brit pop bands like Blur, Pulp, and Elastica, and dream of how cool it would be to be British. I would picture drinking at pubs, cute boys with accents, running into Damon Albarn casually, and wearing DocMartins every day. Teenage daydreams, right? So, when B told me about Paris, I immediately invited myself along, and stuck on a London trip for both of us – boom, summer vacation trip!
B and I have a system that works well for us when we travel to large cities like London and Paris. We do a bit of research on things to see, do, and eat, then make a large list. Then we divvy the list up into days depending on the location. We usually end up checking off 3-4 items off each day, which makes for long days and lots of steps on the Fitbit since we always stick to walking first and public transport second. Our system is simple, and probably the same thing everyone does, but it works really well for us and keeps the arguing contained to how early we are waking up in the morning (I love sleep too much).
Day 1: Arrival in the morning, Big Ben, the London Eye, Trafalgar Square, St. James’s Park, Buckingham Palace, dinner at Dishoom in Covent Garden for great Indian food.
Day 2: London bridge, Borough Market (closed from the terror attacks still, so we ended up stopping into a random pub for a full English Breakfast), Tower Bridge, Tower of London, pub stops, and dinner in Chinatown for Sichuan Food (nothing to call home about).
Day 3: Westminster Abbey (Charles Darwin’s grave!), Afternoon Tea at the Covent Garden Hotel, The Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, and dinner at Mahdi for Persian food
Day 4: Shopping at Oliver Bonas for clothes, Full English Breakfast (again) at Kensington Square Kitchen, Kensington Palace Gardens, Hyde Park, Notting Hill, shopping at Superdrug for British beauty brands, and dinner near our hotel at The George IV with sticky toffee pudding.
Day 5: Portobello Markets, neighborhood strolling through Bayswater, Paddington, Mayfair, Belgravia, back to Kensington for Sunday Roast at The Scarsdale Tavern, then all the way to Chiswick – Pub crawling the whole time. It was a very long day on the feet.
We ended up staying at the Clayton Hotel in Chiswick, which is a few underground stops outside of central London (which meant that is was relatively cheap). In hindsight, we should have forked over the extra money to be closer to the center of town, and for a better hotel. It was an average of a 30 min tube ride one to and from London, so the money we saved went directly towards public transport costs. Also, our hotel had plumbing issues and a smell that I couldn’t get out of my nose for days afterwards. In the grand scheme of things through, these were minor issues. Mind the gap!
Next up is Paris!
Teachers Have Lives Too! 