Post-Vacation Recap: London
Sillyheads abroad
We spent last week in London, which turned out to be almost exactly ten years after Kate and I were there last, for the Worldcon in 2014. This was the first trip across the Atlantic for SteelyKid and The Pip, a destination chosen because it didn’t present dramatic language barriers and because pub food has long been one of our go-to meals with our exceedingly picky eaters.
So, of course, after arriving on a quasi-redeye flight and a long cab ride to the hotel, they both adamantly rejected fish and chips at the pub across the street from our hotel…
Things did trend upward after that, but it took a couple days to really get right. On the whole, though, a very good family trip. Some brief recaps and photos below; if you want to see a shitload of photos, I posted a Google Photos album with 400-odd pictures (not including the 80-some good shots where you can see the kids’ faces).
Day 1: After the less-than-completely-successful pub lunch, we walked across the river and did the London Eye (the giant Ferris wheel), figuring that was a low-impact activity that would get us oriented a bit. It’s… a giant Ferris wheel. Nice views, that’s about it.
Following that, we walked back over the Westminster bridge (“Look, kids! Big Ben, Parliament!”), then wound our way back to the hotel, a half-block down from Trafalgar Square. The evening set the basic pattern of much of the trip: We went to dinner up near Leicester Square, and then I went and got a pint or two of cask ale at one of the half-dozen pubs on the block where our hotel was.
Day 2: This was the absolute disaster day. The first problem was trying to get out and about on the early side— SteelyKid is Not A Morning Person in the best of circumstances, and jet-lagged SteelyKid is even worse. Being made to leave the hotel into drizzly rain was not a popular choice. Then we hit the first of my fuck-ups for the day: I had not purchased tickets for the War Rooms in advance, and so there weren’t any available at the time we were there, and we had other plans for later in the day. So, major fail one.
We got a partial reprieve thanks to some pastries in St. James’s park, then Kate and SteelyKid went back to the hotel and The Pip and I walked up to look at Buckingham Palace. Which is, you know, a big rectangle with a huge crowd out front, even in the rain.
The afternoon plan was to attend a Premier League game; not for any particular rooting interest, but just as a cultural experience. This was the second massive fuck-up, though the actual up-fucking had happened a week or two ahead of time. When I expressed interest in seeing football in London, several people recommended Leicester City vs Fulham as the best of that day’s slate. When I went looking for tickets, the Fulham FC site didn’t offer much in the way of getting four seats together, so I turned to the secondary market, where I found seats on offer in a section near mid-field. Having had good luck in the past with the US version of this sort of transaction, I bought them.
The reseller platform promised delivery by Friday, the day before the game, and I got an email with “tickets” while our flight was in the air. Scare quotes because these were four image files, listing the wrong section, and not looking all that plausible as, you know, tickets for a major sporting event in the Year of Our Lord 2024. Emails and calls to the reseller didn’t produce any quick resolution, though, so we went up to Craven Cottage at the appointed time— I was, in fact, on the phone with the customer service agent when the gates of the venue opened— and were turned away because the “tickets” were, in fact, transparent fakes.
(We did, finally, get email from the reseller promising a full refund, an hour or two before I was going to escalate it to my credit card company…)
So, that was a long trudge back to the Tube station to return to our hotel.
Day 3: The point where things started to turn around. I got tickets for the War Rooms, which The Pip had chosen as his activity that everyone else had to go with, so we did that. Which was a mixed bag in that SteelyKid is very anti-museum, and tapped out pretty quickly. It’s also built almost entirely around an audio tour, which is very much not our favorite mode— more descriptive signage, or a printed guide book would’ve been a big improvement.
In the afternoon, Kate and the kids took a bus up to Harrod’s to go shopping, while I walked up through various parks and streets, taking photos. My expectation was that The Pip would’ve gotten bored by the time I got there, at which point he and I would go get lunch somewhere. This was a problem in two ways: first, he was still in on the department store experience, and second, Harrod’s and its immediate environs are a preposterous neighborhood in which everything is far too ostentatiously high-end for anything like a kebab shop or a curry place. I ended up eating an absurdly fancy hot dog in the food hall at Harrod’s.
Not the most successful day of the trip, but a clear improvement over the previous. I met up for a couple of pints with some college friends who happened to be passing through town that night, so it definitely ended on an up note for me.
Day 4: We made an agreement before leaving where each of us got to pick one activity that everyone else had to go along with (plus a couple of big-ticket full-group items: the football game and a musical (about which more later)). We also wanted to get at least one trip out of London proper, and with that in mind, I picked going to Stonehenge via Salisbury as my activity. Stonehenge is, after all, in the subtitle of my most recent book, and Salisbury has (what is claimed to be) the world’s oldest working mechanical clock, so it was a good place to go for professional purposes as well as general tourism.
The day we marked out for this turned out to be a bank holiday, which didn’t end up complicating things as much as I had feared when I learned that. The train to Salisbury was very smooth, and the Stonehenge tour bus got us out to the site with little fuss. The parking lot was packed and the ticket queue was huge, but the tour included admission, so we got in very smoothly.
Whenever I mentioned Stonehenge, people would say “Oh, I don’t know, it’s pretty disappointing…” I’m not really sure what their reference point is, though, because we thought it was pretty great. Yeah, I guess if you were there in the 1960’s when they’d let you climb the menhirs, being kept back ten meters would be a letdown, but we were plenty close to the circle, and the approach (on a footpath through a cow pasture, for me and The Pip anyway; Kate and SteelyKid took the shuttle bus) was lovely. Despite massive numbers of people being there (bank holiday…), it was surprisingly chill, too.
After Stonehenge, we took the bus back to Salisbury, grabbed lunch at a pub in their market area, and then walked up to the cathedral. Which was also very cool— towering Gothic architecture, stained glass, fascinating carvings. Also, the mechanical clock and an original Magna Carta. Not overly crowded, either, so a really nice vibe to the whole thing.
It was definitely a worthwhile day trip from London. Had I been by myself I would’ve left earlier and tried to get in a stop at the Old Sarum site, too, but I think I’m the only one who would’ve been into that, so we passed it by.
Day 5: This is where we hit the pattern that really worked for us. After considerable negotiation, we agreed not to ask SteelyKid to do anything significantly before noon, but The Pip and I are both early risers, so we set out on our own, taking the tube over to the Tower, because he was disappointed at not having been able to see the iconic bridge yet. After that, he allowed that he’d be interested in going inside the Tower, so I bought timed-entry tickets for the next morning.
After that, we had Kate’s chosen activity: a guided tour of The Globe followed by a matinee show of “The Comedy of Errors.” The tour focused on the play itself, explaining a lot of the plot and also some key things about the staging, along with all the expected stuff about the physical layout of the theater, etc.
This was a little bit of a gamble, as SteelyKid has not been a fan of the Shakespeare they’ve done in school (“Romeo and Juliet” and most of “Macbeth”), but live theater is a different beast. It’s not a play I had seen or read, and it is, in fact, very silly; it was also generally easy to follow what was going on, making for an enjoyable afternoon (if a bit hot, as our seats were in direct sun for the whole final act…).
Day 6: The Pip and I headed out early to do the Tower of London, which we had skipped ten years prior (Kate saw it during a term abroad back in college). This is very well done, though as an American I spent a good deal of the time we were in the Crown Jewels exhibit wanting to yell “Every bit of this is extremely silly!”
For the afternoon, we had tickets for the Science Museum’s hands-on gallery and then a big video game exhibition with dozens of playable games in a big dark room in the basement. That was a bit much for me; I was also starting to suffer a bit of hay fever, so I tapped out after a bit and made my way back to the hotel to rest up before the evening.
That night, we went to the Fortune Theater to see the musical Operation Mincemeat, which was a high-energy show with a cast of five, all of whom play multiple roles. The songs were good, the staging was terrific, and it’s a nice little theater. I’d say it’s worth checking out; the kids had a blast.
Day 7: While killing time before the Globe tour, we walked out onto the pedestrian bridge, which is aligned to St. Paul’s. At some point in that, we ended up telling the kids how Kate and I bailed out of climbing all the way to the top of the dome, and in fact ended up kind of motion-sick from all the spiraling stairs.
This gave The Pip the idea to show us up by making it all the way to the top. Which of course meant one of us had to go along, so our joint excursion on our last full day was to St. Paul’s. Where we did, in fact, make it all the way up to the very top:
I want this out in the world as proof of how much I love my kid, because this is Very Much Not My Scene: I’m not a big fan of heights in general, and the last stage of the climb involves tight narrow spiral stairs between the inner and outer surfaces of the dome. The British would hardly allow an unaccompanied 12-year-old boy up there, though, so for The Pip to achieve his goal, I had to go with him.
That afternoon, we had SteelyKid’s chosen family activity, the Crystal Maze Live Experience. Which is basically a cross between an escape room and a game show, where you take turns competing in various challenges. It’s all very silly, but also very SteelyKid, and generally good fun. And produced one of exactly two photos containing all four of us (shot in front of a green screen, which is why my stance is kind of improbable looking…):
That evening, we went out into the southern suburbs to have dinner with a college friend and his family at their house, which was great.
The following morning, we packed up and headed out for Heathrow, whose security check was maybe the worst airport experience I’ve had in the last twenty years. That’s material for a different post, though, and aside from that, the flight and drive home were mostly just tedious.
And now we’re back, bracing for the start of school this week (my first day of classes is Wednesday, The Pip starts Thursday, and SteelyKid on Friday). Not the most restful end to the summer, but a good fun trip all in all.
This is obviously not a super regular occurrence, so I can’t promise a lot of posts like this. I will have some more general things to say about the UK visit experience later in the week, though, so if you want that straight in your Inbox, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
Finding out that a ticket "purchased" on the secondary market is a nightmare of mine and something I worry about even with the reputable American resellers, always breathing a sigh of relief when the tickets scan... Good Grief! Did you at least get a refund?
I was in London for just a couple days this summer with my wife and daughter, one leg of a longer European vacation. We also did the Tower - similar thoughts about the Crown Jewels. I highly recommend getting one of the Yeoman Warder tours of the Tower, that was a highlight of our trip.