We landed in Stanstead, one of those annoying remote airports, made our way into the city on an airport express train, transferred onto the tube, then once further enough toward our Airbnb, ubered the rest of the way! Lugging gear in a huge city is not fun but oh the English language! Oh the British accents! It was a welcome relief after 6.5 weeks to be able to fully understand everything! 

We arrived in an exhausted heap but our hosts kindly let us in and showed us round. The lady was a head teacher and we some how got onto the subject of exams….coulda talked for hours!

After a good solid sleep we walked over to where my Nana used to live, saw her old street and house. I was a bit hesitant and nervous! That was my first home in London when we lived here in 2007 for 5 or so months. It was getting renovated so they had the front door open. We stood and watched for a while, reminiscing lovely memories. After that we popped into her favourite supermarket and then took the bus to Richmond park where we saw deer just wandering around, it was lovely to see all the green wide space in such a big busy city. We ate our lunch and walked back to the Airbnb to rest. 

That evening I missioned into the city to meet up for dinner and a show with my best friend from high school days. It was lovely to be together sans family’s. We enjoyed Asian fusion then went to ‘Hamilton’.
I had seen that show was coming to NZ and expressed to Mum my disappointment to miss it while I was away, so captain obvious announced I should just go see it while I was in London. Ahh the mothership, always there to say it how it is.
You need a pretty good understanding of American politics history…particularly round presidents, to grasp it. I had just enough. There was a lot of rapping and quick talking in rhyme that you had to concentrate on. No singalong songs. Worth going to – yes. Would I go see it again – no.
It finished at 10.30pm so a late night for me tubing back to our Airbnb at 11pm on a Wednesday night! If you know anything about London you’ll know the tube was not empty, there was plenty of people around, i did quick footed it the 12 or so minutes between the station and the house though!! 

The following day we moved up to my friends house. Dumped our stuff and I took the kids out to Greenwich, where time begins! It was a mammoth 70 minute train journey from west to east London then 70 minutes back! They’ll be doing a project on time soon to make sure they learnt something!! We also visited the maritime museum, they had a ship simulator- that was pretty fun!!!! 

After that it was days of museums and shopping!
The boys did the imperial war museum, us girls happily skipped that in favour of Hamleys – a 5 story toy shop, we walked along Oxford Circus popping into different shops for this and that. Little R totally owned the pavement and was not at all fazed by the busyness of thousands of people. I was so proud of her. We found Hyde park which had several sets of people horse riding – that just made our wee girl’s day!  We walked up to Paddington station and caught the train home! For dinner we went ‘down pub’ (you need to say that in a British accent in your head) and had a stroll along the canals. 

The next morning we took my friends wee boy to music class then to swimming class, after that we trained into Covent Garden for the London transport museum. I had wanted to go when it opened in 2007 but missed it, tried again in 2018 but was too exhausted after visiting Buckingham palace so this time it was third time lucky!! It was different to what I imagined but great all the same, I didn’t get a turn on the tube driving simulator! It was home via the massive Lego store and equally as large, the m&m store! 

A pretty packed week after 5 days of walking the Camino!

After a night of packing up all our stuff BK was taking little R to Italy to pick up a lease car as it turns out you can’t just hire a car and drive it country to country then pay a relocate fee. A loop hole is to get a lease which means you own it with guaranteed buy back – this was all organised via a NZ company and paid for in NZD before we left, we used the same company in 2018. BK and R ferried it over to Greece and CK and I flew out from London and met them there. 

We’ve now left Greece and moving onto the second half of our trip with our own wheels!! A brand new Peugeot 3008 SUV that got handed over to BK with 1.5 kilometres on the clock….I’ll be sure to ask what it is when we hand it back!!! 

Onward we go! 

Till next time,

Claire