I am new to the blog-o-sphere so I can't promise any special formatting of fancy typefaces, but we will try to use this as a bit of a journal to document our adventures around the UK and France. We might trade off who writes them, but read mine too even though I don't have the natural writing charm Kate does.
Anyway...Memorial Day weekend in the States turned out to be the same weekend as "Spring Bank Holiday" in the UK so we had a long 3-day weekend as well. There was supposed to be a train strike on Monday here so we decided against planning out a great weekend trip and opted to wander around London. Turns out the strike was cancelled so we did sort of a half/half in London and elsewhere.
So Saturday we went to Hyde park in the morning. It's like the central park of London although not quite as large (combined with Kensington Gardens it about 2/3 the size of central park). Anyway, since all of the neighborhood squares and gardens in South Kensington are private, we decided saturday at the park sounded like fun and we could let Hannah run around.
Here are a few of the highlights of the day at the park.
So after the park, we grabbed an ice cream thinking Hannah would eat it (she loves chocolate ice cream--takes after me in this respect) but Hannah was too tired to be bothered with Ice Cream and insisted instead on being held constantly. She fell asleep as Kate and I sang the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" as we walked back through the park.
After a proper nap we decided to wander back out. We went to Notting Hill to wander to Portobello Rd. I am not familiar with the Bed Knobs and Broomsticks song, but Kate tells me they have one about the road so I'll have to re-watch it. There were a few shops and then they stopped after maybe half a block and then turned into residences. It was a little underwhelming to be honest and we thought...hmm...surely this can't be it, and so we followed the people and the street turned into a pop up bazaar. Tons of little shops and knick knack peddlers selling anything you can think up.
We grabbed our tickets at Victoria Station which ended up being like a 5 minute tube ride from our apartment and although it was pretty busy it was actually pretty easy to navigate through. |