Week 41 in London and Bourton-on-the-Water, Cotswolds Gloucestershire

Week 41: 11 - 17 January 2016

It was back to London and back to work for us, leaving the Pennings to explore London on their own. On Monday they boarded a hop on hop off bus tour, the same as we did all the way back in Week 4.

The bus tour also includes a ticket for a river cruise, which we they went on the next day. They also visited the Tower of London on Tuesday, where the Crown Jewels are housed.

When we hired a car back in June and went to Stonehenge, we collected it from Gatwick airport and drove from there meaning that we avoided the congested and narrow streets of central London. On Wednesday, they also hired a car to drive out to Stonehenge, except that they arranged the pickup from Victoria station. Victoria is in one of the most central areas of London; probably not somewhere you’d want to navigate on your first time driving in the UK. Nevertheless, they made it to Stonehenge and back in the silver Focus that sported number plates with a great letter combination for both Brad and Brendan.

On Thursday the car was left at home and they went to the Changing the Guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace, then over for lunch with Brendan. After lunch they hit the shops once more, heading to Harrods.

To gain a further insight into the history of London’s, on Friday they went to The London Dungeons. An indoor walkthrough experience, the Dungeon recreates and explains various events from London’s sinister past in a humorous style. Lunch today was with Roslyn at Borough Market.

For dinner, we all met at the Harvey Nichols department store in Knightsbridge to go to Burger & Lobster up on the 5^th floor. For a restaurant in a high-end department store, it actually offers surprisingly good value even if the entire menu is spelled out in the name. For £20, your choices are a beef burger, lobster or lobster roll. Between the five of us, we all had the lobster and it was exceptional!

Following on from dinner we went and checked out Lumiere, a brand new light festival of a similar theme to Vivid in Sydney. As the official promotional company for London, Roslyn’s work was one of the major founding partners of the festival.

On Saturday morning we headed across to Camden Markets to the second outlet of the Cereal Killer Café. We had a Chocopottomus, which contained Coco Pops, Krave (another chocolate cereal), a Kinder chocolate hippo and chocolate milk.

That evening, Brad and Suella went to a Fawlty Towers themed dinner show, while we took Adam along to a Wetherspoon’s for a cheap and cheerful pub dinner. Afterwards, we strolled down to Westminster Abbey to see it illuminated as part of Lumiere.



A road trip was in order on Sunday, out to the picturesque village of Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Coltswolds district of Gloucestershire. As we were out packing the car, we discovered that overnight there had been snow with a small dusting across the car. We went back inside to continue getting ready and at the time we were ready to leave, it was lightly snowing once more. There was enough to make a small snowman - not quite our white Christmas, but the closest we were going to get!





We bundled ourselves into the car and set off. London’s traffic, road rules and driver behaviour are different to Australia, and with Brad behind the wheel our journey was at times truly terrifying. Fortunately as we headed further out of London, the narrow and congested streets became straight open motorways, and the dense grey of the urban areas turned into vast open fields covered in snow. Somehow, we arrived alive in Bourton-on-the-Water after about two and a half hours, just in time for lunch.



Bourton-on-the-Water encases nearly all the stereotypes of a picturesque English village, a little river running through town bordered by weeping willow trees, sandstone buildings, and plenty of green open space around the village centre. It is only quite a small village, and being still quite early in the year many of the stores hadn’t yet reopened after the Christmas/New Year closure period.

The Duke of Wellington came highly recommended by Trip Advisor, and is just what you’d expect a charming old English pub to be. The pub has a great outdoor deck area, backing onto the river and under a canopy of trees. Unfortunately for us, the weather for most of the day was an on-going unpleasant drizzle so we remained inside for our meal.

After lunch, we went for a brief wander around the area and into some of the gift shops. Next door to the The Duke of Wellington is the Cotswold Motoring Museum & Toy Collection, where the yellow super hero car Brum lives. The museum was closed on the day of our visit, and so Brendan was unable to relive one of his fond childhood memories.



With little else to see and the weather pushing us towards somewhere warmer, we piled back into the car and returned to London.

Highlights for the week:
- Hop on hop off bus tour (Pennings)
- River cruise along River Thames (Pennings)
- Tower of London (Pennings)
- Day trip drive out to Stonehenge (Pennings)
- Changing the Guard ceremony (Pennings)
- Lunch with Brendan
- The London Dungeons (Pennings)
- Lunch with Roslyn
- Dinner at Burger & Lobster
- Lumiere light festival
- Camden Markets
- Cereal Killer Café
- Fawlty Towers themed dinner show (Brad and Suella)
- Day trip drive out to Bourton-on-the-Water
- Snow!