Sweet Home {Huntsville} Alabama: London Calling

In just a couple months the fiancé and I will be heading out to London for a vacation. This will be his first trip to Europe, actually it’s his first trip out of the country period, but I’ve got family there so I’ve been visiting since before I can even remember. With the Olympics happening there right now and this trip coming up soon, it got me thinking about the last time I went to London and so I thought I would share some of the highlights of that trip with you…

It all began back in October on a flight home from California. One of my best friends and I had been out there for her brother’s wedding (along with our families and many other friends). She was sitting behind me on the plane and we were chatting through the seats about how much fun we had and how we needed to start planning our next adventure. It just so happened that I had recently been offered a job interview in London coming up in November. I had originally planned to just go out alone, but once we started talking about it, we decided it would be much more fun if we extended the trip and both went. The next day I got online and booked our flights and a hotel and about two and a half weeks later we were off!

We took the red eye and arrived in London early enough that we had a full day when we got there. Our first stop was the hotel to drop off our luggage. I say hotel, but really we were in an old townhouse that had been converted to a B&B. The B&B was in a great location, close to Paddington station, and the family that ran it was extremely helpful. Any questions we had they were quick to help with and they also provided us with maps and would mark directions for us. We were on a budget, so these were not luxury accommodations by any means, but they were perfect for our needs. We had even booked a room on the fourth floor because you could get a discount since there were no elevators. I might also mention that the stairs got more and more narrow the farther up the building you went, so it was a rather hilarious sight to see us attempting to pull our giant, overweight suitcase up the stairs. By the time we reached the final flight, I’m pretty sure the stairs were narrower than the suitcase was. It was all just part of the adventure, though.

(our B&B)

We only had three full days there, but you’d be surprised how much we managed to fit into those days (we were there four full days, but nearly a full day was taken up with traveling to and from my interview). We hit as many tourist sites as we could, including: the London Eye, the Tower of London, the London Dungeon, Big Ben and Parliament, London Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, the M&M store, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park and the theatre. We knew we wanted to see a show, but we weren’t set on a particular one or day, so we ended up purchasing our tickets the day of the show from one of the half price booths. I would recommend these booths to anyone wanting to see a show (also in NYC), because we ended up getting great seats at Wicked for about half of the regular price.

(outside the theatre before Wicked)

One little added bonus we got was the Winter Wonderland fair going on in Hyde Park while we were there. They had carnival games and many different rides and food booths set up for this event. We didn’t try out any rides, but it was free to get in and walk around the fair, so we did do that one evening. It provided a fun little element of Christmas to our trip. We may not have been in London for very long, but we sure did manage to create some wonderful memories while we were there!

Here are a few more pictures of those memories: