Woo hoo! Spring break in London!
 

Where: London, obviously.

Who: Myself (mother of two, professional, travels a lot for work), Son (18-year-old, last time he’ll have spring break that coincides with his younger sister’s), Daughter (15-year-old, altogether delighted that her future spring breaks probably won't coincide with her brother’s).

When: Spring break for public schools here in Atlanta, the week right before Easter.

Why: Well, Cancun just isn’t going to happen for me, ever, and particularly not over spring break. London was the kids’ choice. They’d been before and chose it over numerous other European destinations, some old and some new.

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/prop...t=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...vern/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/...ioli_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).