For the first time ever, I saw sun in London. We touched down on a glorious morning, to see sun and have it be 13 degrees in the middle of winter is unheard of for London! We checked into the Clermont in Victoria- only a quick walk away from Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park.
We knew that London would be expensive, but given we are the definition of "living above our means" we had found a hack to counteract the cost of living. There is a restraunt booking platform that gives you dollars for everytime you book, and sometimes there are bonus points etc. In melbourne you can cash these in for $50 off a meal...but in the UK it's £50 - so almost double. We saved up ALOT of these so you'll see them peppered through our trip. Anyway, our first booking was a late lunch at the Londoner in Piccadilly Circus, where we managed to get away with 6 dishes for only £20 after our discount!
We then went on a little bit of a pub crawl through Belgravia (I professed to Doug I loved the area and wouldn't it be a good place for Nala and I to move to, he just laughed in my face and asked when I was marrying Bill Gates). We had booked tickets to Hyde Park Winter Wonderland, a massive Christmas Themed Fair that was bigger than the Melbourne Show! We wandered into a Circus style show where we saw daring acrobats spinning 15m above ground from hanging fabric and 4 motocross riders dodging each other in the circle of doom. After all that death-defying craziness, I decided that you only live once so we were skipping dinner and heading straight for dessert at a little pub on the way home. A Sticky Date Pudding and Apple Crumble was just what the doctor ordered.
Day 2 in London started with a voyage to Borough Market. I'm not sure what I was expecting but it was madness! People everywhere and stalls selling everything from Soaps to Oysters! We had a wander around before settling on sharing "England's best Sasuage Roll". Looking for another budget friendly activity we decided to jump on a train out of town and head to the RAF museum where we saw planes from every war including a Spitfire and even got to try our hand at designing our own plane (mine was pink, great for speed and terrible at everything else unfortunately haha).
Keeping in with our budget theme that evening we found a Caribbean themed 2 for 1 cocktails, because we all know that Mango Mojitos are the perfect drink for a 10 degree night. We then went to a nice vibey restaurant in Mayfair for another £50 off! Finally we finished the night off at a local pub and met some puppies seeking refuge from the cold.
New Years Eve had arrived and that meant our soccer game. We caught the regional train to Tottenham and weaved through the town houses enroute to White Heart Lane, I couldn't believe there was a 60,000 seat stadium literally next to houses in a residential area. We had no real plans to ring in the new year as we didn't want to spend a fortune on a planned event so just decided to do our own little pub crawl starting at "The Bear" in Paddington and ending at 1am at the "Queens Arms" in Victoria. It was lovely just sitting in a pub, watching the fireworks on TV with all the locals, we really felt like we were Londoners at this point.
New Years Day was understandably very slow, we visited China Town as I was told only Sweet and Sour would fix Doug's sore head. We caught some of the NYD parade on Oxford St and stopped in to explore all 7 of Hamleys toy filled levels before heading home for an early night.
The 2nd of Jan was back to our regular jam packed schedule. We started the day commuting 3 suitcases across town to Covent Garden where our hotel was for the night (we extended our time in London and couldn't stay at the same hotel). We then ran across town to the F1 arcade, an activity we booked for boxing day but had to cancel in the flight delay madness. We did three tracks Bahrain, Zanvoort and Suzuka - unfortunately for Doug I was far too good and won every race! We then had lunch at an Argentinean restaurant and had the biggest cookie in the world for dessert! Doug had a surprise activity afterwards for me, a special exhibition at the Natural History Museum about the Titanosaur which was the largest creature to ever walk the earth, they had a full skeleton of it and this thing was MASSIVE! We also saw Hope, the skeleton of the Blue Whale which is the largest animal to ever to live on earth (including the dinosaurs). After seeing alot of really big things it was time to walk across Hyde Park as we had Curling to get to! Unfortunately due to super windy weather it was cancelled, however to our luck on our way back to the tube we found a pub running Trivia! With no other plans for the night- how could we not! We actually somehow ended up winning (team name Quizard of Aus) and lucked into a £50 free bar tab as our prize! Another budget friendly night for the Hutchinsons!
Jan 3rd was a day I won’t forget but I’m very confident it will be forever etched into Doug's memory as we took a train to Milton Keynes. An unremarkable town in every way about an hour north of London. However it is the base for the Red Bull Formula 1 team.
Through a chance meeting in Easter back in 2022 Doug had gained a contact who was able to arrange an exceedingly rare behind the scenes tour of the entire factory.
Our phones had their cameras taped up and in we went. Doug's jaw on the floor almost the entire time, we saw the machining of clutch parts, the painting of the new car’s colour scheme four massive autoclaves as well as the engines being tested on Dyno’s.
We then were treated to lunch with the workers in the team and got to learn much more about the business of F1!
Rounding a very Doug friendly day we ended the day at an airport hotel which had a runway view, flight tracker app on hand Doug narrated 3 hours of flights for me until the Heathrow curfew mercifully started and 11pm and we hit the hay!
Distance Travelled: 41,642km
K x
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