As every tourist knows, there are only two places in England, London and Stratford upon Avon. Also, Shakespeare is boring, so we decided to go to London. Truth be told, we were supposed to go a couple of weeks ago, but we were deleayed due to issues with water supply turning our house into the Sahara Desert.
We went in style though, we took the fast train down to London, only 1 hour and 17 minutes to get there and we raced across to Hyde Park for the Winter Wonderland festival, exhibition, thing. It’s kind of a load of wooden boards stuck down in Hyde park and then a number of fairground rides built on top of it, together witan ice rink and a traditional German Market. So traditional in fact, that the ice skating rink was sponsored by Lidl. They were in fact selling ‘pigs in blankets (sausage in bacon)’, so we munched some of that. Weirder still they made Mrs Rad sign up for an app, and then that gave us access to the lidl VIP area, which was a small space on the top of the pigs in blanket stall where we got an exclusive view of the ice skating. Really, we should have gone home at this point as nothing was going to top that.
These Christmas ‘things’ have sprung up all over the UK – yes, there’s one in Stratford too. They can be a bit hit and miss – a number of them have closed down, due to ‘meet santa in lapland’ being ‘grandpa in his shed’, this sort of thing. The one in London seemed really coo. Far too expensive obviously, but there were loads of really cool rides, and interesting foods to eat and it was massive loads to look around. I even went on my annual helter skelter.
We stayed for a couple of hours and then we walked through Hyde Park and took in some views of the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall. I have memories of going here as a child to see concerts with my parents. They’ve improved the area around it a lot and it looks even nicer now.
Then we went to the science museum, free to get in if you can avoid all the marketing, and we spent the money we saved by going to the top floor to the milkshake bar. Nothing helps me learn science more than and ice cream with sprinkles for £7. I do recommend a visit though, we didn’t have ages, but we looked at the aviation exhibits (Radling 2 wanted to know how big a 747 was) and then downstairs to look at the exhibits on computing – Mrs Rad delighted in taking pictures of her first mobile phones, which are now exhibits on a museum wall!
We then travelled on the tube back to London to get home, and our authentic UK experience was completed by our train being cancelled and the next one being late. We arrived exactly 29 minutes late, 1 minutes less than the time allowed to claim a refund on our train fare.