Woo hoo! Spring break in London!

Hello Therese, cant wait to read more! It was a pleasure to meet up last week!

Thanks, Jamie. I'm enjoying your report of your trip over Easter, though I will admit to being a bit perplexed initially: children? What children?

(and for those of you who are in turn perplexed by this reference, click on jamikins to see the report and read about the little darlings)

Advance planning:

Truth be told, not much. I was finishing up the year's schedule for work and realized that I was unexpectedly going to be able to take the week in question off. Normally this week is the subject of pretty intense competition, as my colleagues and I all have school-age children, and I'd taken it the previous year (in Amsterdam, on a house boat, very cool). So there I was, sitting in front of the computer, and so decided to plug the dates into delta.com's award availability calendar. I tried Paris first and was a bit shocked to see that my exact dates were available at the lowest rate. I then checked a few more destinations and all were available.

So I called a family conference, by which I mean that I called into the next room where the children were both watching some rubbish on the TV:

"Hey, do you want to go to Europe for spring break?"

"Uh, sure."

"Where would you like to go?"

"Uh, wherever."

"Well, what about Paris?"

A bit more yelling back and forth and we'd settled on London. The next stage actually required that I walk upstairs, where my husband was staring at his own computer screen.

"Do you want to go to London with us on spring break?"

"No, not really."

"Would you like to go somewhere else?"

"No, not really."

So, that was settled, and I booked our tickets. Direct flights ATL-LGW at 7:40 PM Friday (so I'd be going directly from work), return not quite so direct, LGW-CVG-ATL, departing mid-morning the next Sunday (Easter Sunday, in fact).

This is looking a good fun read so far...

More Please, soon.

Lodging:

Seems like I always end up in the same neighborhood in London, South Kensington. It's certainly a very nice place: reasonably posh, reasonably safe, reasonably central, very good transit access. Probably the think that I like least about it is that it's so very popular with tourists, so popular that one is hard-pressed to hear English spoken at all. Lots of French, lots of Italian, lots of Spanish, but very little English. Oh well.

I did end up choosing an apartment (with some input from Fodor-ites, so thank you very much) at the south end of this neighborhood, so almost Chelsea. Given that it was already February and I was looking at a pretty popular travel week my choice was limited. I enlisted my daughter's assistance in choosing among 15 or so properties that various agencies were able to suggest, and we used the following criteria:

Sleeping arrangements: ideally three separate bedrooms, but I wasn't going to be able to afford that unless we stayed farther out. Kids absolutely didn't want to be in the same bed (and who could blame them?) and I didn't much want to be in the same bed with my daughter.

Washing machine: ideally in the apartment, though in the building would be okay.

Internet access: very, very desirable

Distance to closest tube station: over 10 minutes walk less than ideal, particularly if we ended up with windy wet weather

General attractiveness of property: difficult to define, but mostly to do with the quality of the furnishings and the amount of natural light

Daughter set up a little grid and we went through the various properties and agreed that this property looked best:

http://www.aplacelikehome.co.uk/property.aspx?pid=8&list=propertylist

If you look at the apartment you'll see that it wasn't absolutely perfect, as the children are still sleeping in the same room (the downstairs room with two blue divans, each of which folds into it's own full-size bed) and in fact it's longer than 10 minutes to the nearest tube station (either Gloucester Road or South Kensington---this fact assumes rather more significance later in this report). No internet listed either, but when I asked about it the agency said that the owners would install it before our arrival.

On the positive side, the apartment was large overall, with good separation between various living areas, including a large eat-in kitchen and a separate bathroom for me. Good proximity to a couple of small groceries, and a bus stop just around the corner (more foreshadowing). Semi-ground floor, but very large windows with correspondingly good natural light. Careful inspection on seety and google maps shows no commercial development on the street (Drayton Gardens) whatsover.

So I booked, and started thinking about other details.

I'm along for the ride, Therese.

Along for the ride indeed, stokebailey. Perfect segue to my next topic, ground transportation.

Within this category falls transit from and to the airport, as well as trips within London. I'm a big fan of public transportation for lots of reasons: better for the environment, better for your brain (since you have to think about it), better for your sense of community (because you have to share space with others), and easier on your wallet. I'm especially keen on making sure my kids understand it, and understand how best to take advantage of it.

Airport transfers in London are generally quite easy to do via public transportation, and at considerable savings over, say, a taxi. Gatwick is served by the Gatwick Express and Southern Railway, with Gatwick Express charging a bit more (16.90 GBP vs 10.90 GPB for a one way ticket). Both give discounts if you purchase round trip tickets, and both have discounts for groups (4-for-2 on Gatwick Express, DaySave on Southern). Since we'd be traveling off-peak I chose the DaySave option, requiring that I order the tickets on line in advance. The tickets were mailed directly to my home here in Atlanta, so not only were they cheaper, but I didn't have to bother with purchasing them after my arrival.

So by way of comparison, round trip car transfer arranged by the apartment rental agency would have been 140 GBP, whereas via Southern was 40 GBP (plus the cost of the tube + the walk from the tube station). Not a huge difference, but enough.

Every Therese I have ever met has gumption and you are no exception..now carry on. This is going to be good.

Into each life some rain must fall, and my delight with the airport transfer was tempered somewhat by my failure to obtain a Zip card for my daughter. What, you ask, is a Zip card? Well, it's an Oyster card and photo ID together, and the holder of this card is entitled to ride buses and trams absolutely free and gets the child rate for other London public transport. In the case of off-peak travel that's capped at 1 GBP per day.

But there's a catch, and the catch is that you have to order the card on line (using a digital photo) at least three weeks in advance of your pick-up date. Hardly difficult, you say, but that's because you haven't met my daughter: camera shy does not even begin to describe her, particularly when the person taking the photo is either of her parents. So I've got scores of pictures of her turning her head quite rapidly away from the camera, and not a single one of them will serve the purposes of the good people at Transport for London.

She is, by the way, lovely, and one day will look back with regret at her reluctance to document her loveliness at this point in her life, but never mind that for now. It's a photo that I need, and quickly. So I ask her for one pretty much every day, explaining to her that it will save money and make things much more convenient for everybody, and she does, finally, email me a picture. Unfortunately it is now less than three weeks to the beginning of our trip, so never mind again. She will come to realize the error of her ways, and rather sooner than she expects.

All right! Love the foreshadowing.

Love this report, sounds like my somewhat dysfunctional household with conversations echoing room to room. I emailed my daughter from the study to her bedroom the other day, guaranteed to get a quicker response!

Looking forward to the tale, Therese. I am still flabbergasted that your husband said no!

Loving the report thus far, can't wait for more!

Count me in the crowd waiting for more!

Thanks for all the encouragement. It's fun to write these reports and fun to get feedback as well. I've gleaned all sorts of great tips from others' reports over the years and hope that I'll have some to share.

As for my husband saying that he'd rather not take the trip, well, different strokes for different folks. I still remember the first time I told him (years ago, over dinner in a Thai restaurant) that I thought we might want to consider taking separate vacations some of the time. He was the one taken aback then, but once we did finally realize that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do it actually relieved some stress in our marriage: his idea of a vacation does not involve jet lag and foreign languages, and my idea of a vacation does not involve long car rides punctuated by single night stays in roadside motels. Or camping.

Both of us compromise: he went to Amsterdam with us last spring break, and Stresa the summer before that, and I spent a week rafting and hiking the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho last summer, and planned the third stop on a 'round the world itinerary in January so that he could easily join me.

The kids are the real winners, as they go on nearly twice as many vacations as they would if we all traveled together all the time.

"The kids are the real winners, as they go on nearly twice as many vacations as they would if we all traveled together all the time."

Besides being exposed to a wider variety of experiences.

You're not just whistling "Dixie" there, CAPH52. Travel broadens the mind in all sorts of ways, and I count myself very lucky to be able to offer the experience to my kids.

I agree very strongly, Therese. In fact, that was pretty much the idea behind my son's essay for his college apps! (Both the mind broadening and his appreciation.)

However, I suspect HappyCheesehead may have meant something more along the lines of being surprised that your husband would turn down the chance for a trip. Though I know I really shouldn't try to speak for someone else!

More planning...

My husband's deciding against this trip simplified things quite a bit, since that was one fewer opinion to take into account (and frankly my kids' opinions count but I've got clear veto power over them, and of course don't when it comes to my husband) and it also meant that my evenings were mostly free. So the mildly tiresome experience of visiting a zoo could be offset by the anticipation of an evening in adult company.

And as it happens Fodor's is very handy for arranging this sort of thing. I started a thread suggestig a get-together in London and got some interest and so that was added to the schedule. I also contacted friends who live in or near London and added them to the schedule as possible.

Hmm, what else... I printed off LondonWalks' schedule and found an old DK guidebook for London (didn't bother to buy a new one, as I'd have web access while there), mostly for the kids to glance at.

I packed the evening before we left (all carry-on, of course), and spent the last day scurrying around work finishing up every last possible task.

The conversation about whether to go on a spring break trip sounds exactly like those conversations at my house. My husband's first response when asked to go almost anywhere is no. Sometimes I try to talk him into it, sometimes I don't.

We rented from A Place Like Home in London a few years ago and loved the experience. It was by far the nicest apartment I have rented for a vacation in Europe.

And they're off!

Our flight was scheduled to depart at 7:40 PM, and as it was the Friday of spring break I was anticipating possibly heavy holiday traffic in addition to the usual evening rush hour. Since we don't check luggage and I'd been able to check in on-line the previous evening and print our boarding passes I wouldn't normally have left so much time for our trip to the airport, but just to be safe we were on our way by 5:00 PM, driven by our very pleasant chauffeur (aka Daddy). We made very good time, and security at ATL was a breeze, so I headed for the Delta lounge in the E terminal for a pleasant hour or so wait.

The lounge was packed, and so the attendant suggested that we head next door to the much nicer premium lounge. I ate my dinner there (never, ever eat the food on the plane) and the kids snacked and I finished dinner with a Bailey's + vodka. I do not suggest this beverage if you're planning on doing anything complicated, but if you're planning on going to sleep it's great.

Boarding was easy and we were ready to push back early, but then ended up waiting for extra "service items" (presumably enough alcohol to keep Business Elite happy) to be loaded and departed nearly an hour late.

Cruising altitude reached, I took my usual Ambien, put in/on earplugs and eyeshade, and woke up somewhere over England. I have absolutely no idea what my kids did during the flight.

Amazing tailwind over the Atlantic, and we arrived at LGW early (and of course had to wait for a gate).

LOL, thanks CAPH, that is just what I meant! Nothing disrespectful at all, I just can't imagine not wanting to go

Sounds like Therese and hubby have it all worked out perfectly and the kids ARE really lucky. I can remember I thought it was a big deal when we went to Wisconsin Dells for the day when I was a kid.......

Wow, do I envy your being able to sleep that well on a plane!
Must make your first day so much easier!

Better living through chemistry.

LGW to London transfer...

Immigration and Customs at LGW no big deal (and no wait for luggage, of course), and we headed to the train. The Gatwick Express and Southern Railways trains depart from the same platforms, and when we arrived there was only a GE train waiting. I asked an agent on the platform and he assured me that the Southern would be there shortly, and it was. Easy trip to Victoria, where we queued to purchase paper 7 day Travelcards, as well as a 1 day off-peak child's pass for Daughter. The latter costs only 1 GBP and the easy way to ask for it is to say "kid for a quid".

At this point I got to decide between taking a bus (the 211 runs from Victoria to the bus stop right around the corner from the apartment) or the tube and then walking from either Gloucester Rd (with which the kids and I are very familiar) or South Kensington. In the end I chose the tube, as it meant that I didn't have to figure out exactly where the bus stop was, but it did mean a longer walk. Six of one, half dozen of another.

We exited at Gloucester Road and walked the 15 minutes or so to the apartment, where we found that our pre-arranged greeter was not, in fact, waiting for us as had been pre-arranged.

Bummer.

Cooling our heels...

So there we are, standing on the front stoop of our building. Thinking that perhaps our greeter was waiting for us inside I rang the buzzer for the apartment, but no answer. Finally I rummage through my paperwork and find the phone number for the person that is supposed to be greeting us. My phone's been in airplane mode, of course, and since the arrangement wasn't supposed to involve any phone calls I hadn't turned it on until this moment. She answers cheerfully and explains that there's been a change of plans, that we're to be met by somebody else, and that somebody else has just left to meet another party checking in and she'll contact her and have her come right over.

As I hang up I notice that I've gotten a voice mail, and listen to it, and it's contact person #2, asking me to please ring her when we get to Victoria so that she'll let us know when to expect us. And of course I'd have been happy to do precisely that if I'd been informed of the expectation previously. Sometime, say, before this very moment, standing on the stoop of our apartment building with two drowsy teenagers.

So I listen to the voice mail several times over, trying to write down the chirpy, rapid numbers while cars zoom past (why oh why can't people who leave numbers on voice mail understand that they need to slow waaaay down? and for some reason my phone wasn't showing it as a missed call) and finally try calling, and can't reach her, so I call back the original greeter and she also reports that she can't reach her, so instead she's sending the housekeeper around, as she's got another set of keys.

Fine.

The housekeeper arrives about 15 minutes later and lets us in. I have her leave the keys, as I'm not at all sure that we'll manage to meet with our official greeter that day and don't want to be trapped in the apartment.

Um, mea culpa?

The apartment is lovely, exactly as depicted in the photos on the web site. As we are settling in I get a call on the apartment phone (which you can apparently use for incoming calls free, but have to set up a method of payment if you want to make outgoing calls, so I didn't) from contact person #2, apologizing for the delay and asking when it would be convenient for her to drop by, to which I answered "Now."

So 10 minutes or so pass and she does show up, a bit flustered and very apologetic. Here's the conversation (more or less):

"Oh, dear, I am so sorry. You see, you took longer than we'd anticipated getting to the apartment, and this other party of two gentleman arrived and so I had to go attend to them."

"That's surprising, actually, as our flight wasn't delayed and we didn't have to wait at baggage claim, so would have made very good time."

"Ah, yes, in fact I checked and your flight was early, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was, but that's the time the plane lands, not the time that passengers disembark, and we waited for a gate. Still, no significant delay."

"And I did leave you a message on your cell phone..."

"But the previous arrangement mentioned nothing whatsoever about needing to make contact by cell phone or checking for messages."

"Ah, but there was this other party of two gentleman, and their flight was also early, so I had to go to the other property."

"Yes, I see."

"Again, so very sorry that you took so long getting here."

I refrained, just barely, from pointing out to her that she wasn't actually apologizing so much as she was complaining. I did not point out that the correct phrasing for this particular apology would go something like this:

"Oh, dear, I'm so sorry about the delay. I was mistaken in my estimate of how long your trip would take, and really just can't tell you how upset I am that you were inconvenienced."

Or, alternatively:

"Oh, dear, I'm so sorry about the delay. We were short-staffed today, so your expected contact had to man the office phone and I was asked to fill in for her at the last minute and as luck would have it the two parties conflicted in their timing. Please accept my sincere apologies."

And lest you think that this is just me being weird, both of the children commented on the conversation afterwards, pointing out that she wasn't very good at apologizing, was she? It reminded my daughter of the sort of apology that a three-year-old makes after biting another child: "I'm sorry you made me so angry that I bit you."

The kids are whipped, and since I've got plans to go out that evening I don't insist that they stay awake. So they fall into bed and I run out for groceries. When I return I also lie down for a nap, and wake up in time to shower and prepare dinner for them (a quiche and green salad from the Sainsbury's Local at the corner, followed by sticky toffee pudding).

And then I dress for dinner and head out. Saturday night in London!

Dinner is at The Providores (http://www.theprovidores.co.uk/first.html), a lovely restaurant in Marylebone that was one of several suggested by my dinner date for the evening, Fiona. Fiona is my extremely cool friend from London whom I met through a food web site. We first met (in person) on my last trip to London with the children, and since then she's stayed with me (in Paris) and I've stayed with her (in London). Huge fun, very clever, very pretty.

The restaurant's a storefront located on Marylebone High Street. The lower level is called the Tapa Room, and when I arrived at 7:30 it was quite frankly heaving with the young and scruffily attractive. The hostess greeted me and I explained that I was meeting a friend, and she directed me to the back and up the stairs. There I was met by a server who took my coat, and as if by some pre-arranged signal a door to my left opened and I was ushered by yet another server into an almost surreally serene (given the din below) and elegant dining room decorated mostly in white. Fiona is waiting and we have a lovely evening catching up and eating very nice food while the restaurant fills up around us. Crowd very attractive, looks like the cast of "Notting Hill" has dropped in except that these people are all better looking and better dressed.

I dine on plaintain fritters, followed by lamb with polenta, followed by coconut panna cotta with a citrus tapioca. Great cocktails as well. We split the bill, and it was a large enough amount that I'm not going to confess to it.

We finish dinner in time to take the tube home. No late night for me, as I am now pretty tired.

I return home to find my son watching television and my daughter in my bed. My bed? Not likely, I think to myself, until I go to roust her and find that she's got a fever. Probably the same febrile illness that her father had the previous week, and now I'm resigned to getting it myself. Oh well.

She sleeps soundly. Me not so much, as I wake frequently to check on her.

Just realized that link doesn't work, so here's an alternate:

http://www.theprovidores.co.uk/

Really enjoiying your report so far and looking forward to the next installment!

It's just offal what they say about the food...

My daughter is still febrile when we wake, but she has no specific symptoms and clearly doesn't have the flu and is willing to eat and drink a bit, so I'm not too concerned about her. But clearly she won't be up for touring today, so my son and I arrange to stick close by just in case she needs something. The original plan had been to go to Greenwich that day (Sunday), so change of plans and instead we head out to the South Kensington museums.

We stop first at the V&A, where my son is very obliging about letting me look through the Fashion Galleries. Heck, he's even willing to look at the exhibits with me. One of the reasons we'd started with the V&A was that somebody here at Fodor's had mentioned that the cafe there had nice food, but when we got there we decided against it. Here's what my son had to say about it:

"Hmm. These prices seem pretty high."

"They do, don't they?"

"Particularly given the fact that you have to go through a cafeteria line to get it."

Exactly. So we left V&A and headed across the street, happening across the Brompton Bar & Grill:

http://www.bromptonbarandgrill.com/

Another "beautiful people" sort of place, with the crowd largely comprised of older couples and families that all appeared to have purchased their clothing from shops designed to coordinate with the restaurant decor. The neighborhood's got lots and lots of French ex-pats (the lycee is just up the road) and a certain point I switched into French with one of the (obviously francophone) staff, who becamse positively effusive as a result.

We started with a shared appetizer of crispy pig tails, followed by steak & kidney pie for my son and Dorset crab on toast and a green salad for me. Rhubarb crumble aferwards for me, but Son was too stuffed. He did quite like his pie, particularly the kidneys, which he'd never had before.

Don't recall the price now, but you can look at the prices on line if you're interested. All of the food was quite nice and good value considering the location and ambience.

We head over the Natural History Museum next, concentrating on the geology and jewel exhibits. We stay until Son starts to feel tired and head back home to find Daughter feeling much better for her day's rest.

Just who is the Cholmondley Warner character, anyway?

Upthread I mentioned that I'd posted here at Fodor's to see if there was any interest in a gtg, and heard back from Jamie and Scott (of jamikins and Bikerscott fame) as well as PatrickLondon and TaniaP. In the end I somehow managed to not text the final coordinates to TaniaP correctly (very sorry, though it does sound like you managed perfectly well), and CW was taking care of some family issues, but the gtg did come together.

Son and I had stopped at the Gloucester Road Waitrose to pick up pate and cheese and bread for the children's supper, and took the tube to Goodge St and found the Fitzroy Tavern without difficulty:

http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/70/703/Fitzroy_Tavern/Fitzrovia

Finding my drinking companions was a bit more difficult, as I was the first to arrive. Patrick was next, and having made his own tour of the pub finally came out and approached me. Jamie and Scott finally found us and we drank for a while and finally head across the street for Indian at Rasa Samudra:

http://www.rasarestaurants.com/UserPages/index.aspx

Pleasant space with obliging staff. Apparently a somewhat unusual style of Indian food for the UK, as its south Indian veg & seafood rather than the more usual chicken tikka and vindaloo, but very much what I'm used to eating here in Atlanta, so I ended up ordering. Hmm, what did we have (Jamie or Patrick or Scott may be able to add more detail)? Both nair and plain dosai, some sort of fish curry (and was there also a shrimp curry?, eggplant in a creamy cashew sauce, and lemon rice are all I can recall. Oh, and lovely banana dosai for dessert for me and Jamie.

Since the civilians all had to go to work in the AM we finished up fairly early (11:00? surely not later) and I returned home to find my angels asleep.

Mmmmm...dinner was delicious! Company even better! Hope we can do it again next time you are in the UK!

I'll be in touch (though I've no immediate plans) and maybe next time we'll get to meet our mystery man, CW.

"Zed Ess Ell"

We were all moving slowly on Monday AM, and since Daughter hadn't been out at all yet I decided that this would be her special day. She happens to love zoos, and the weather was particularly pleasant, so this would be ZSL day. Her brother is exactly as interested in zoos as I am, and since leaving him behind to watch telly and play computer games and at least contemplate doing his physics homework meant that I wouldn't have to pay for him to go in, that was just as well.

So out we headed, just in time for lunch. I took her back to the place I'd been with Fiona on Saturday, Providores, but this time we ate downstairs. Very rustic decor that contrasted somewhat with the "ladies who lunch" crowd (that is if the ladies all appear to be ex-models with a great deal of time on their hands). Daughter had a sort of thick Spanish omelette with sweet and white potatoes and I had smoked duck breast with fried sheep's milk cheese and pomegranate. Daugher had hokey pokey ice cream (the restaurant's New Zealand-ish) and I had meringue with passionfruit (which I'd have called pavlova) which she ended up liking quite well.

On our way to the zoo we stopped at a chocolate shop called Rococo Chocolates to buy a gift for Fiona (whom we'd be seeing that evening) and bought her some chocolate ravioli (Daughter's choice):

http://rococochocolates.com/product/65/rococo_ravioli_selection

The zoo was, well, the zoo.

Just who is the Cholmondley Warner character, anyway?>>>


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ivsb79-h90

Cholmondley-Warner is the one who's always offending our sensibilities with risque postings like the above. Honestly, Cholms. You're flirting with another deleting.

Patrick refused to come to my GTG just because in a disreputable part of town, and the main entertainment throwing eggs at a fan. So I'm envious (or is it jealous? sometimes can't decide which to be).

And yet Patrick was willing to attend an evening for which I'd suggested that we might all get tattoos. Not that we did, but I hadn't ruled it out entirely.

As for the real CW, the one on youtube, I already knew about him. It's the mystery man that's the puzzle.

See. My point about Patrick.

Well, enough of my troubles. Carry on with your fun report.

"You look like a monkey and you smell like one, too"

I was a bit dismissive about the zoo (ZSL) upthread, and realize I should give a bit more detail for any of you who might be contemplating the trip.

It's located in Regent's Park at the northern end, and if you walk along Regent's Canal (as we did on an earlier visit) actually walk underneath next to it. Or rather underneath it, as it bridges the canal. Admission is on the pricey side at 18.50 GBP for an adult, but if you've got paper Travelcards from National Rail (we bought ours at Victoria, remember?) and remember to go to the Days Out web site (http://www.daysoutguide.co.uk/) in advance and print out your voucher you can do get a 2-for-1 deal. Since my son wasn't along on this trip my daughter was able to use his Travelcard. She'd have been eligible for the child ticket in any case but that's still 15 GBP, so that was 15 GBP saved.

If you're feeling particularly flush as a result, not to worry, ZSL's got every possible iteration of zoo paraphernalia available for you to spend it on. We managed to resist.

Anyway, lovely zoo, with my favorites being the Snowdon Aviary, the otters, and the birds of prey display. This last event takes place on the Display Lawn, a sort of grassy amphitheatre where the audience sits while sharp-taloned birds swoop low over the heads. Or rather where the audience is supposed to sit, but there are always a few who insist on getting up, and part of what makes the show so fun is the anticipation that one of these individuals will meet with some, um, misfortune.

As it turned the show was cancelled soon after it started when one of birds decided that he'd much rather pursue live prey. His name was Harry, and for a while there we thought he'd come to a bad end himself in the tiger pen, but it turned out that he may have inadvertently dropped his kill into the tiger pen, where a tiger was perfectly happy to finish it off. <burp>

Harry may well still be at large somewhere in the greater metropolitan area. Probably visiting Cholmondley-Warner.

Enjoying your report...

Thanks, travelgirl2, and anybody else reading along.

London swings...

We came home from the zoo to find that Son had not, as promised, tidied the flat, so we dashed around a bit making it presentable, just managing to beat our host for the evening, Fiona, who arrived right on time for an aperitif of elderflower liqueur and Tesco cheese straws.

How very elegant. Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson all rolled up into one, that's me.

We'd planned on taking public transit to our dinner venue, catching the bus around the corner from the apartment. But when we got to the stop I realized that the ticket machines I'd seen at some of the busier stops in central London weren't at this stop. And neither I nor Fiona (who uses an Oyster so never thinks about it) knew whether it was possible to buy a ticket from the driver. Hmm, if only a certain somebody had helped her mother get her Zip Oyster in time...

So instead of waiting for a bus and possibly finding out that we were out of luck I suggested that we hail a cab, and within seconds we'd all four piled into a proper London cab, complete with jump seats for the kids. Earlier I'd explained to the kids that cabs in the U.S. had these when I was a child, and that sitting in one was of my favorite things about a day out with my mother (who didn't drive at the time). These days they feature seat belts.

So we pulled up to Fiona's private club in Soho in style. She'd planned on eating in the bar, but it was busy, hosting a book party for a slim but compelling book called "Fifty Ways to Find a Lover". So we headed up to the dining room, which was also pretty cool though nowhere near so crowded as the book party. Interesting decor, sort of shabby chic if shabby chic were to drop acid. Nice food and a very pleasant evening.

Home by 11:00 or so, so London would have to swing without me.

Fun reporting, Therese.

Tuesday on the Thames

Sorry for my having neglected this report for so long---very busy at work, and then a bad case of computer flu (very tedious story) earlier this week).

Anyway, on with the fun.

What with Daughter's having been ill and so forth, this was our first day of touring all together. I'd initially planned on visiting Greenwich on Sunday (when the market's in full swing) but decided not to put it off in case the weather took a turn for the worse later in the day.

I managed to drag everybody out of bed in time to (at least in theory) get to the Tower Hill tube station in time for the 10:45 start time of LondonWalks tour of Greenwich (which I'd taken with my husband several years ago and was doing with the children at his emphatic suggestion). This meant leaving the apartment a bit before 10:00 so as to be able to walk to the Gloucester Road tube station and catch either the District or Circle line.

But wait, there's something else I'd need to do at the Gloucester Road station, and that was purchase Daughter's "kid for a quid" ticket. And to my dismay the Gloucester Road station is absolutely packed with (mostly) French and Italian tourists who either haven't the faintest idea what they're supposed to do or just like spending lots of time in queues. Or just milling about aimlessly. I did manage to get to a ticket machine quickly (because it only took coins, as I recall) and couldn't find an option for purchasing this type of ticket (presumably for reasons that will become apparent later in this episode) and realized I'd have to get to a ticket window somehow.

So I looked at the time and decided that if we walked very quickly to the next tube station (South Kensington) and the lines were short there that we might just make it. And of course I also knew that if we didn't make the tour we could just proceed on our own.

So after giving Daughter a very stern look (it being her fault that she didn't have her very cool Zip card to make this all very easy) I set off at a breakneck pace. South Kensington was much quieter, and I approached a window and asked for a "child's off-peak day ticket". After he'd figured out what I wanted the agent looked at me, asked to see the child (though he didn't ask specifically for proof of age), asked me if she'd be traveling with me, and asked me what sort of ticket I had (a Travelcard, which I showed him). Finally he was willing to issue the ticket, and off we went.

In the end we did make it to Tower Hill before the tour left, and paid (student rate of 5 GBP for both children, though the guide initially balked when Daughter couldn't produce her school ID, which I'd also told her to bring, and 7 GBP for me + 2 GBP for a discount Walkabout Card) plus some additional amount of money for the boat ride that I can't recall just now.

The tour was fine, but not as much fun as the last time due to (a) our guide being rather more worried about enunciation than about providing lots of information and (b) two of the original (very large) party getting separated from the group when we arrived in Greenwich. They called the LondonWalks office, who in turn called our guide, and we all got to stand in front of the Greenwich DLR station for quite a long time while they caught up to us.

Once the tour was finished we were hungry, and so we stopped for lunch at Trafalgar Tavern (http://www.trafalgartavern.co.uk/), where I had whitebait, Daughter had caesar salad and Son had a sandwich of some sort.

We checked out the the Painted Hall (http://www.oldroyalnavalcollege.org/the-painted-hall/) and then the Maritime Museum (http://www.nmm.ac.uk/). The exhibits at Greenwich all close fairly early (at 5:00 PM), so missed going into the Queen's House or the Royal Observatory, though we did climb to the top of the hill and enjoy the lovely day from our perch on the grassy slope.

By the time we got home we were all exhausted, and ate dinner in (a not particularly amazing curry dinner from Marks & Spencer, if memory serves, followed by bread & butter pudding) and crashed.

Tuesday on the Thames, continued...

Just remembered that I left out the last part of our day in Greenwich, which was the return trip.

We walked under the Thames via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel (http://www.greenwich-guide.org.uk/tunnel.htm). The kids found this memorable for several reasons. The first was the large number of cyclists riding in the tunnel, despite it being very clearly marked as prohibited. The second was the elevator at the far end that brought us back up to street level. It was the elevator that fascinated, but the fact that it was manned by an operator. The idea of an operator was just entirely foreign to them, and the fact that he was at liberty to play recorded pop music was even more fascinating.

We boarded the Docklands Light Railway at Island Gardens. I find this trip very cool, very much like I've somehow been transported to the future someplace where everybody travels through the air and buildings emerge from the water. Not everybody's cup of tea, but my son found it every bit as interesting.

We switched at Bank/Monument, which you shouldn't do because it's almost impossible to do at the moment (explaining the signs in all the trains that tell you to avoid doing it, but of course I wasn't paying much attention). Since we were tired I decided to switch at Victoria for a bus that would take us all the way home (rather than a 10-15 minute walk from a tube station). I withdrew some cash (my first and only withdrawal for this trip, as I'd arrived with about 80 GBP from a previous trip and paid for most things with a credit card) while we waited, and we hustled right up to the upper deck to score seats (easy as this is relatively early in this particular route's journey) which offered a great view of London from up high (again, a bit like the DLR). Lots of disappointed tourists downstream on this trip, and a testy driver who insisted they not stand on the upper level (eventually leading to my explaing in Italian to a large group why she'd stopped the bus and was pounding on the ceiling of her compartment).

Finally, home.

Therese,

Your experience with the foot tunnel was the same as ours -- lots of cyclists who were simply not amused that a group of people might be walking under there. My thought about the elevator operator was that it must be the worst job ever. Let him have his pop music!

Walks on Wednesday

Wednesday AM featured another LondonWalks tour, this time to a site that I'd never previously visited, the Tower of London. I'd considered doing this visit on our own, but knew that I'd likely have difficulty getting the kids going as early as I'd like (to avoid lines), so we once again headed out the door a few minutes before 10:00 but this time went directly to South Kensington rather than Gloucester Road (where I had no doubt that some of the very same tourists might still be standing).

We made good time to Tower Hill and met Brian, our guide. No nonsense about my daughter's needing her student ID, and he did an excellent job of herding his very large group around. With the tour you get a break on the admission fee and get to enter through the group entrance. Much more information, much brisker pace. A woman who'd been in the Greenwich tour the day before said hello, and we talked for a bit, and she asked if I'd been on any of the pub walks. I answered yes, and that I was considering going on one that evening, and she was as well. Also in the group was a guy I'd swear was an old boyfriend with whom I'd parted on bad terms. We did not speak, so I don't know for sure (and if I never know that will be just fine), but it lent an eery quality to the tour. The world is a very small place.

The tour ends at the line to see the Crown Jewels. The guide continues to speak to the group (now standing in line) until right before you enter the building, so the wait goes quite quickly. Were it not for this inducement I'd have skipped them, as I don't find them all that compelling and the actual experience didn't change my mind.

We had lunch at the New Armouries restaurant. Self-service, but the food was good and reasonably priced, and the dining room pleasant (or as pleasant as a large dining room full of children can ever be). We finished out the afternoon at the Tower, and headed home, more or less whipped, again.

Thanks for mentioning your lunch at the New Armouries restaurant. The day that we "do" the Tower we're probably going to need to grab something close and quick. So, though I'm guessing it'll be a lot busier in June, it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Anxious to hear the rest when you have time, Therese.

This is taking me pretty much forever to complete, isn't it? That pesky job... Oh, and there was the hideous computer virus last week, the first one ever that's required that my entire hard drive be wiped clean. Very tedious.

I should have a few minutes of downtime today.

Believe me, I understand, Therese. If you were to look at my trip report list, I think you'd find that it took me at least a month to finish most of them! So, compared to me, you're zipping right along!

More Walks on Wednesday...

You'll likely have gathered by now that when I say that we returned home from the Tower "whipped" I really meant that my children were whipped. I was tired, of course, but I'm not going to let that sort of thing get in the way of having a good time, so once I'd gotten them home and provisions laid in for their supper I headed back out, this time via tube to Mansion House to meet Shaughan for the Along the Thames Pub Walk. The group was again a bit larger than I'm used to for London Walks tours, again presumably due to it's being a holiday for many people (and nice weather so far as well). I met some people on holiday from Norway, and an English couple (just in London for the afternoon---some friends had done the tour and told them about it, so they thought they'd do it as well), and the woman I'd met from the earlier tours (who turned out to be from Singapore, on her via to a wedding in Paris). Ever smaller, the world.

A pleasant tour, my first visit to the other side of the Thames this trip, and afterwards I had a late dinner with my new friend from Singapore at Wine Wharf (http://www.winewharf.com/index.cfm). Nice food, nice wines, convivial atmosphere, open late. I had a veal and beef burger (unusual for me, but I was quite hungry by that point) and it was excellent. By now it was getting fairly late, so once again time to head home.

Where did you go Therese? Please post more!

Back, finally, though still with entirely too much work on my desk. It's Friday, though, so time to give myself a mini-vacation. Or at least re-visit my most recent one.

So...

I'd been trying to decide whether to try for theatre tickets at Leicester Square, and if I did this was going to be a good morning to go do it. I'd been checking the web site all week (http://www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/tkts/) to see what had been available, though, and based on our tastes didn't really see anything that was going to make all of us all that happy, so instead decided that we'd do something else that evening, precisely what to be determined.

It's also entirely possible that my late evening the night before had something to do with my decision to sleep in.

So, another not very early start to the day, such that we managed to make it to our first stop, Borough Market, by about 12:30. None of us was too hungry yet, so we walked around a bit until we were, and by that time it was getting late for a sit down lunch. So instead we all chose something from a vendor. Ravioli in brown butter and sage for Daughter, bacon butty for me, and a mixed butty for Son. Very nice, if ridiculously large. No actual grocery shopping, as we were headed for a museum.

The museum in question was the Imperial War Museum, where we spent an interesting afternoon. I spent most of my time in the Children's War area of the museum. None of us visited either the Holocaust or Genocide exhibits.

We caught a bus home and dined in, picking up something at one of the shops right at the corner of our street (Drayton Court? must check) and the Fulham Road. There's a set of cinemas just catty-cornered from the shops, and as I'd suspected there was a movie showing that I thought we'd all enjoy. I'll wait to tell you what it is, but here's a hint:

Radio Caroline

Anybody old enough to remember it (or similar)?

Love the report

""Do you want to go to London with us on spring break?"

"No, not really."

"Would you like to go somewhere else?"

"No, not really.""

But I am worried. I live in Atlanta.... Are you married to my boyfriend? (Just kidding but this sounds JUST LIKE our conversations...So tomorrow he will drive me the Hartsfield and give me a kiss goodbye while my mother and I fly off to Spain and Portugal. That's if I ever pack!)

Not sure how historically accurate it is - or is meant to be.

'The Boat that Rocked' is supposed to be about Radio Caroline South, which really started the pirate radio thing in Britain, and therefore forced a change in the way radio was run in Britain.

It didn't start offshore broadcasting: before Caroline we used to listen to Radio Luxembourg for pop music in the 60s, and previous generations had listened to Radio Normandie or even AFN (broadcast from Frankfurt, I think). Britain wasn't unique: Italians listened to Radio Capodistria (beamed out of that shrine of free markets and free speech: communist Yugoslavia) and the French listened toFrench-language Radio Luxembourg or Radio Monte Carlo. The Dutch had had the pirate ship Veronica for years (and it had had a following in Eastern England for years too). There's a bit of serious exaggeration ion all the nostalgia about Caroline etc.

Not least about Radio Caroline South's popularity. It was rapidly overtaken, at least for street cred, by fellow-pirate Radio London, which was the radio station all my southern peers listened to. For them Caroline was a bit of an old fart.

What did retain street cred, though, was Caroline North which 'The Boat that Rocked' pretty much ignores. Caroline North was anchored off the Isle of Man, which gave it even more complicated defence against prosecution, and practically monopolised pop music broadcasting from mid-64 to what was still, just, the pop music music capital of the world. It DIDN'T play wall to wall Merseybeat: it played Southern and US pop music, and its playlist was probably a bigger influence on what Liverpool record stores stocked than what the Cavern DJs were into. Roughly as important as Ready Steady Go - and much, much, more omnipresent.

It's a Richard Curtis film - nuff said. But apart from that, Therese, did you enjoy the film?

Well enough, Patrick, well enough. For those of you not familiar with Richard Curtis, other credits include "Four Weddings and Funeral", "Love Actually", and "Notting Hill". And if you've seen any (or all, as I have, but not at the cinema) of them you may find yourself spending the entire film trying to remember which actor played which role in which previous movie. Emma Thompson's got a great small role in the present film, for instance, but there are lots of other appearances that will make you laugh out loud at their weirdness. Remember Hugh Grant's very bizarre flatmate in "Notting Hill"? In TBTR we're to believe that he's a dead sexy DJ with a huge cult following. Or not.

Here's the trailer at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnQc3lO4JDs

Anyway, a pleasant evening at the cinema, and very appropriate for my two teenaged children. The cinema itself was huge and clean and featured very nicely stepped stadium seating. I chose the film in part because of the purported subject matter: pirate radio stations. My first visit to Europe was when I was 17 (in the 1970s), as an exchange student living in France (in Normandy, so one could pick up stations in the North Sea) and the movie does give a sense of just how limited the access to media of all sorts really was then. Not only was there no email or internet (a fact which my children can really only just barely grasp), but even music was a lot harder to come by: your choices were radio (and even in the 1970s radio in France was pretty pitiful) or records. Remember records? You had to go to an actual shop and buy them, and then you had to play them on an actual turntable.

Possibly more fun than the movie, and certainly more memorable was this ad for Cadbury that was shown beforehand:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVblWq3tDwY

Oh, and props to flanneruk for his very nice summary of the history of Radio Caroline (and similar).

CarolA, I'm pretty sure that I'm not married to your boyfriend, or rather that you're not dating my husband. Though that might describe his reluctance to travel... You and I both travel enough that perhaps it is the same guy and he just splits his time between us.

Hmm....

Enjoying your report, Therese! London is one of my favorite cities.

And then what happened?

What happened next is that we went to bed, and slept wonderfully.

I did forget to mention something that had occurred earlier in the week: the toilet in the downstairs bathroom stopped working, as per my children's report. Upon investigation I found that the flush mechanism had likely come detached from the one of the downstream lever thingamajiggies, as it pressed (it was a button on top of the tank) but met with none of the usual resistance. Simple enough to fix, of course---just take off the lid and re-attach whatever's not attached, right? Well, yes, but in this instance the toilet lid was not detachable. The original design appeared to call for detachability, as it was clearly made as a separate tank and lid, but when it was installed somebody decided to bond them together with grout or mortar or something (the seam was visible at the base of the lid) and no amount of tugging and pulling was going to separate them. I emailed A Place Like Home and told them it was fine with me if a plumber visited while we were out. Since my upstairs bathroom had a toilet this turn of events was inconvenient, but hardly the end of the world.

Oh, and did you check out the Cadbury's ad? It's pretty cute.

I did and forwarded it to my daughter. We love Cadbury's.

Your children are a couple of lucky young travellers. Sounds like a great trip.

I guess you already know that an Englishman says sorry when it is your fault or his. In this case it looks like a bit of the passive aggresion you see in capital cities when tourists don't do what you think they are supposed to do.

Fascinating perception

So glad this was topped as I have missed it till now! Fabulous reporting...and yes, you might be married to my dh who was a grump the other day and said "I am not ever going back to Europe unless it is Italy" LOL...alrighty then.

Good gracious, it's Good Friday...

And the beginning of the holiday weekend in earnest. What this means from a practical point of view is (a) tourist density begins to reach critical mass and (b) Tube now on weekend schedule, in which several important lines (including Circle and District) would be either entirely or partially out of service until Monday.

Since my son and I both had 7 day Travelcards, this was the last day we'd be able to use them, so I'd decided that we'd do the Natural History Museum and possibly some of the others nearby on Saturday, as we could walk there. If you're thinking ahead at this point you may be thinking to yourselves "Huh? Is she kidding?" But will talk about that when the time comes.

Friday AM finds us once again moving slowly. I've made reservations for dinner at St. John Bread and Wine (http://www.stjohnrestaurant.co.uk/) that evening, so don't have anything too ambitious planned for the day. As we're (finally) walking out the front I realize that we'll need our umbrellas, and when I return to get them am spied by the porter (an obliging young man named Raj or something like that) who asks after the toilet. I reply that it's still not functioning (despite another email and a phone call) and he asks if he can come look at it.

So we all pile back in the apartment and he goes downstairs and fiddles around and comes and announces that the flush mechanism has clearly come loose from something inside the tank, but that the lid's strangely attached to the lid. Delighted to hear that I'm not insane and that people in the UK don't usually seal their toilet tanks closed, I agree with him. He then decides that he's going to try and get the lid off, which seems a very poor idea to me, but he's he expert, right? So he heads to the kitchen, arms himself with a table knife, and proceeds to chip away at the grout. After 10 minutes or so he admits defeat, and says that it's a job for a plumber (yes, yes, that's exactly what it is, I agree, and you'll have to admit that I'm exercising considerable restraint by not prefacing that with a guffaw). And of course since it's Good Friday and the Easter weekend and so forth...yes, yes, I see.

And finally we're off, into our first truly rainy day this trip. Rain had been predicted just about every day, but there was very little of it in the end.

The South Kensington tube station is chaotic. Mobs of mostly non-anglophone passengers shuffling through the gates and being directed to one side (remember, several lines aren't running) by anglophone tfl stall. The line to buy our kid for a quid ticket is crawling, with one (tourist) family apparently doing something very, very complicated with tickets for every last person in the family, and needing many, many questions answered. Finally I get to the window, say "Kid for a quid, please" while pushing my coin through the window, and the clerk's so relieved he nearly cries. This transaction is likely the shortest one he'll have all day.

Our destination for the day (well, the afternoon) is Portobello Rd market. Since I didn't want to wait too late to eat lunch (big dinner ahead of us) we stop at a branch of Le Pain Quotidien: http://lepainquotidien.co.uk/stores/nottinghill/ The Notting Hill Gate location is conveniently near the south end of the market, and has an upstairs dining room which I liked a lot.

I ordered zucchini (courgette, that is) and leek soup as well an egg salad tartine. Son just got the egg salad tartine, and Daugher had quiche and salad. When they brought our food it was immediately evident that I wouldn't be needing my egg salad tartine (which hadn't yet appeared) and the server managed to cancel the order, so that was nice. All of the food was nice, and for dessert Daughter and I both had pavlova and Son had bombe (prompting all sorts Clouseau-isms, of course), and then it was time to go outside and hope it had stopped raining.

It hadn't, and the market wasn't especially busy. We doodled around for a couple of hours and purchased some bread and fruit and veg and then headed home.

Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail...

I'd booked an early dinner at St. John for two reasons, the first being that if we got back to the apartment early we'd likely be able to see another movie (we'd had to choose between "The Boat that Rocked" and "Duplicity" the previous evening). The second is that St. John's menu changes just about every day, and when they run out of something that's it, there's no more to be had. So going late means you run the risk of your pick being already gone.

St. John's (and its sister restaurant, Bread & Wine, where we were dining) is a fairly famous place, known for its chef Fergus Henderson and his style of cooking, described in his cookbook "Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking". And by nose to tail he doesn't mean just the bits in between, but the actual nose and tail.

So you might think that this is not an ideal meal for a family, particularly one that doesn't want to spend an absolute fortune on a single meal, and/or one that includes children or teenagers. Famous chef + weird food + teenagers = disaster, right? Well, not necessarily. The prices at B&W are actually pretty reasonable: starters/small plates are on the order of 6 GBP, and mains/larger plates top out at 13 GBP. So not incredibly cheap, but not ridiculous. And so long as the children (or other potentially picky diners) aren't limited to hamburgers and pizza they'll be able to find something to enjoy.

B&W is very casual, and for once the surrounding crowd didn't give me the feeling that I'd stumbled onto a movie set. All more or less local so far as I could tell, apart from the two young Japanese women who were clearly visiting.

Our dinners were: crab on toast followed by chocolate mousse for Daughter, rabbit kidneys followed by cheese (a washed soft rind one called Stinking Bishiop) and potatoes for Son, and ham with greens followed by something I can't recall except for it perhaps being fish for me. Son and I had dessert, but neither of us can recall what they were.

So, on the whole, food quite nice but not so amazing that I was able to recall every single detail. Son's rabbit kidneys were lovely (PatrickLondon has just experienced a slight frisson of dread) and the cheese was great. Daughter's chocolate mousse was disappointing: correct texture, but not sweet enough (using the baseline of my French exchange grandmother's mousse au chocolat, against which all others in the world are compared).

We got home too late for a movie, and in any case were ready for bed, so that's where we went.

Still enjoying your report.

MomDDtravel, I can identify with you. When our 25th anniversary was coming up, I asked my DH, who isn't an enthusiastic traveler, if there was someplace special he would like to go. He said the only place he cared about going back to was Paris. I said okay and promptly made the reservations!

Enjoying it here as well!

Carolyn - I understand. I am planning a trip for 2012 - well not "planning' it yet, but planning on going in July after I graduate from my BSN-RN program... and it is to Italy. If that is where the man wants to go - so be it!

Can I be a teenager for once? Fluffy bunny? Its kidneys? EEEEUWgross.

Ah, but they were such darling wee (pun intentional) kidneys, Patrick. Each one just a couple of centimeters end to end, and perfectly kidney-shaped (so no fooling yourself that you're eating something else).

Despite my children having grown up with the Easter bunny and Bambi they haven't slightest compunction when it comes to dining on same.

There's a new restaurant here in Atlanta called (no kidding) Abattoir. Possibly the worst name for a restaurant ever, but we went last weekend and it was terrific. I had wabbit.

Can I be a teenager for once? Fluffy bunny? Its kidneys? EEEEUWgross.

Wabbit's kidneys are ESSENTIAL to make good wabbit stew.

When I learned how to shoot it was about the first thing I learned. I was about 10. Yes I shot and gutted wabbits when I was 10. Draw your own conclusions.....

CW - off to "commune" with the body parts in his fridge....

Now it's my turn for a frisson of dread...

Hush my child....

The voices tell me to save you.....for now.....

Hmm. Well, somewhat reassured I'll continue with my report.

Before I get to our last full day in London I'm going to make this statement: crisp is an adjective, not a noun. Or if it is a noun that it should be the sort that doesn't require an "s" added to the end to make it plural. Very few words in English require one to pronounce "...sps" and the fact that one of them is "lisp" is no accident. Cusps are rarely mentioned in the plural, and hasps can be avoided entirely. Wasps can be problematic, as they not only occur in multiples but there's the tricky wasps' nest as well.

But crisps? How did this ever become the term of choice for a popular food item? And to add insult to injury it's a food item that is hardly ever consumed in the singular. "Would you like a crisp?" "Oh, don't mind if I do." No, not likely.

I don't personally eat crisps very often, even when I'm here at home where I can ask for potato chips out loud without the slightest bit of linguistic anxiety. But my daughter had been asked by a friend to bring home some unusually flavored versions (she'd had some flavored like shrimp, apparently), so the entire time we were in London we made a point of checking out the junk food displays in the various shop windows. Here's what we brought home (all single serving bags):

shrimp
something I can't recall
onion bhaji
duck and hoisin
cajun squirrel

These last three were part of a promotion by Walkers to pick a new flavor (said promotion called "Do Us a Flavour"). They tasted more or less like what they were supposed to taste like. In the case of cajun squirrel I'm going to take their word for it---it certainly wasn't what I'd like my chips, oops, crisps to taste like, but then there's no accounting, is there? I didn't actually taste the winning flavor, though, so it's entirely possible that it was worse: Builder's Breakfast, described on the Walker's web site as "egg bacon, sausage and beans."

More frissons.

Saturday's child works hard for a living.

Except on Easter weekend, when he takes his entire family to London. Since I'd initially purchased 7 day travelcards for my son and myself, and today was now day 8 of our holiday, I'd planned to stick close to our South Kensington apartment so as to be able to get around on foot. This plan turned out to have pros and cons.

The principle pro was that we didn't have to deal with the ongoing transit hell that we'd encountered on Friday, with way too many riders (most of them apparently unfamiliar with the concept of mass transit) and several of the central London lines either partially or entirely out of service.

The principle con was that all of those people who did somehow manage to negotiate the tube or otherwise travel had decided that this was apparently the perfect day to visit the Natural History Museum. We arrived to find something approaching a riot scene on Cromwell Rd (where the main entrance is located): queues stretching out the doors, down the steps, through the courtyard, and out onto the street and down the block in both directions. The sidewalk was so packed that through pedestrians were compelled to walk on the street (rendered more difficult by the rows of tour buses parked there). And even more ominously, the lines didn't seem to be moving and those waiting (particularly the well-to-do parents of young children in expensive prams) had that glazed look and tense tone of voice that tells you they've been there for some time.

So despite both children's very much wanting to visit this museum (my daughter having been home sick for the first visit)I was pretty close to aborting the entire venture. I had noticed, though, that the lines all appeared to lead to the Cromwell Rd entrance, and not to the Exhibition Rd one that we'd used earlier in the week. Assuming that this meant that the second entrance wasn't in use that day I nonetheless suggested that we check, and to my surprise it was not only open but had only a short line. Five minutes later we were in.

Crowds inside every bit as impressive as those outside, at least in some areas. In others (particularly the large old-fashioned rooms with cool old windows where things are displayed in flat cases) there was hardly a soul to be seen. A very nice visit in the end.

One of the great things about having older kids is that we can split up and meet up at a pre-arranged time and location. That's what we did, and then headed for Waitrose to purchase food for our next day's trip home.

Much is made of the superiority of supermarkets/groceries in the UK and elsewhere in Europe relative to their US counterparts. I tend not to agree with this point of view, finding instead that it's more a question of the affluence and tastes of the population served, whether in the US or the UK or France. The Gloucester Rd Waitrose is nice enough, but not nicer than my usual Publix (a grocery chain in the southeastern US) and not nearly so nice as my usual market here in Atlanta (which is not a chain, so never mind). I did manage to scrape together sufficient food for the trip home: bread, ham, cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes (out of season, but too bad), radishes, tangerines, madeleines (for breakfast), biscuits, and chocolate. All the major food groups, basically.

And now for our final supper. Where would we dine?

Cromwell Rd in front of Nat History Museum was still mobbed last week. Or mobbed anew I guess; probably fresh mobs daily. Was there a special exhibit?

The Darwin exhibit was on while we were there and likely attracted larger than usual crowds, though to see it you had to have booked ahead. I wasn't specifically interested in it, so didn't bother. There was a butterfly exhibit in preparation at the time that looked like it would be interesting, and so perhaps that's attracting crowds as well.

As we'd been at the museum the previous Sunday, though, and seen it once or twice earlier in the week without a huge mob, I assumed that the crowds were largely the result of the Easter holiday weekend.

Maybe it was the butterfly thing in the tent out front. Darwin was over by last week, I thought. I'm glad you found a way to slip in quietly.

Yes, the butterfly exhibit was being set up outside, in a large tent enclosure. I was sorry to miss it, as I quite like that sort of thing. If any of you are as well and won't be in London to see the one at the Natural History Museum, note that there's a similar permanent installation at Callaway Gardens here in Georgia, a couple of hours drive from Atlanta: http://www.callawaygardens.com/callaway/info/things.butterflies.aspx

L'ultima cena

The other great thing about having older kids is that you send them home with the shopping while you go off to do something else. In this case the something else was a visit to Harrod's.

The point of the visit to Harrod's wasn't so much Harrod's itself, but the nice walk involved. I usually walk quite a bit when I travel, but teenagers (and husbands) tend to get a bit testy when asked to walk as much as I like, so I headed off on a more or less random journey in the general direction of Harrod's.

Since it was the holiday weekend it was, if possible, even more mobbed than usual. The food halls are my favorite. The usual weird mix of tourists: Japanese buying Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the gross (even though there's now Krispy Kreme in Japan), Americans eating overpriced sushi, everybody (including presumably insane locals based on their accents) buying Easter treats.

I managed to get lost a couple of time, so my goal of a nice long walk was met.

On the way back I also picked out a place for dinner: Kwality Tandoori, on Thurloe Place. I walked right by it on my way home, and the menu looked reasonable and the prices very reasonable and the kids hadn't yet had Indian (unless you count the microwave meal from Marks & Spencer that we'd had one night, which was edible but certainly not worth repeating), so I made a mental bookmark of the location (it's very close to the South Kensington tube station) and once home looked up reviews on the web which were fine (the usual mix of "not nearly hot enough" and "fantastic, the best home-style Indian in the UK").

So, back out we go for the brief walk to Kwality, and it turns out that my mental bookmark wasn't very good. In my defense I'll point out that the roads around the station are pretty confusing, and that there's more than one street called Thurloe. So after about 10 minutes of turning around in circles we settled on a different restaurant entirely, Moti Mahal: http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/restaurants/restaurant-2009.php

There's another restaurant in London called Moti Mahal which is pretty well-known for upmarket, fancy Indian cuisine. This one is not it, so don't get them mixed up. There are even on line reviews for this restaurant that clearly refer to the other restaurant.

Nice interior, service pleasant. The menu featured all the classics and I ordered a variety for us, mostly milder items. I can no longer recall all the specifics, but do recall onion bhaji (good, but a bit oilier than I like), kebabs of some sort (very good), butter chicken, rogan josh, some sort of pumpkin curry and possibly one other vegetable dish (eggplant? okra?), and naan. The naan were outstanding. The raita was not. In general there was a nice ratio of main ingredient to sauce, and the spicing was complex but not overly hot (though I'll point out that both myself and my kids have a high spicy tolerance after years of ethnic food here in Atlanta). Some of the dishes were undersalted, which is find with me as it's very easily corrected at the table, and much preferable to the alternative. If I lived in the neighborhood this would be one of my favorites.

Entertainment was provided in the form of the table next to ours: an American ex-pat couple (that lived in the neighborhood; the wife was well-known to the staff) was entertaining a group of mostly adolescents. They were from a smallish town in North Carolina and had never had Indian food. Their initial caution was quickly replaced by enthusiasm, and extra orders started flying out of the kitchen. This was an eye-opening experience for my own children as well, as they couldn't imagine that there could be kids who otherwise seemed so similar to them who'd never had butter chicken or vegetable korma. Travel does broaden the mind.

For dessert we headed to Au Pain Quotidien (just across from Kwality, which I now found without any trouble at all) where I had an assortment of cookies, my daughter had strawberry cake (the pavlova being all gone for the day), and my son had something I can't recall. A lovely finish to our last supper in London.

The long way home...

Actually, it wasn't really, just one connection, but living in Atlanta means that we have to make them much less frequently than most, and then only if we're going some place sort of exotic or out of the way. But because we were flying on skymiles and I could find a decent connection (more about it later) I did accept one this time for our trip home (the outbound leg had been direct).

Our flight was scheduled for a 10:45 AM departure. I'd successfully checked in on line at delta.com, and we only had carry on luggage, so planned for a 7:15 to 7:30 departure from the apartment. This was too early for ladies who staff A Place Like Home, so I agreed that we'd just lock up and push the key back through the mail slot when we left.

I had the kids shower before the went to bed and pack their bags, leaving out just the clothes they'd wear home. I got up early to pack our lunches and shower and pack for myself, and we were out the door by 7:30. I'd checked to make sure that the bus to Victoria from the stop around the corner was running (as it was Easter Sunday), and that one could, indeed, pay a cash fare (2 GBP each) upon boarding. I'd also already decided that if a bus didn't show up quickly and there were cabs available I'd probably just go for a cab, and in the end that's exactly what we did, hailing one easily. The fare was something like 10 GBP and the driver dropped us right at the door for the elevators/escalator that leads down to the correct platform.

I'd pre-puchased our DaySave group ticket from Southern Railway before our departure (on line, ticket mailed directly to my home in Atlanta for no additional charge), so showed the ticket to an agent who also told me which platform to use. Uneventful ride to LGW, though this train was fairly busy with what appeared to be local daytrippers.

I'd expected to do nothing more elaborate at check-in than print out our boarding passes at a Delta kiosk, but despite having already checked in still had go to the counter. No wait at the Medallion desk, though the agent was a bit nonplussed when I told her we had no bags to check. "Really?" "Yes, really." As she couldn't see our bags over the counter she asked me to show her the biggest one, which I did by putting it up on the scale. Well under maximum weight, and obviously fine size-wise, so she shrugged and that was that, we were on our way.