This past week I traveled to London and Edinburgh with my wife and daughter. It was a great trip, though with Monday 25 April the imminent deadline for a major project I ended up working way more than I wanted to - but luckily I was mostly able to do that during travel time/downtime at the hotel. I thought it’d be a good excuse to write up a quick post.
Our itinerary was as follows:
Thursday night we departed for LHR (DCA-ATL, ATL-LHR).
Friday we arrived at LHR around noon - amazingly Elise slept almost the entire flight. Jen and I got in some sleep as well. I had used points to get us an upgrade and the ability to lay out really helps.
We took the Heathrow Express into Paddington station before taxiing to our hotel. By the time we got settled in and had a bite to eat it was about 330pm and we had dinner reservations for 6 pm at Dishoom Covent Garden. We spent the interval walking around and letting Elise get used to the city. Dishoom was, as always, excellent. After dinner, we stopped at La Gelateria for dessert. It’s one of our favorite gelato shops and it did not disappoint.
Saturday morning we took things fairly easy as we had tickets to the Spurs match against Bournemouth in the afternoon. Jen had reserved a table at Hide for breakfast and then we walked back by Buckingham Palace, through St. James Park (Elise made friends on the playground), and then past the Churchill War Rooms to see Big Ben, walk by Downing Street and Whitehall. After that, we changed into our match gear and headed up to the stadium.
The match itself was a crushing 2-3 loss with Spurs looking hapless for much of the fixture, but overall it was still great to enjoy the stadium, show Elise her first Spurs match, and cheer on the team. Even better, she was good with staying the entire game (a first for us). We made our way back to the center of the city before grabbing dinner and heading to sleep.
Sunday we spent some time walking around before we enjoyed an early afternoon tea at the Goring, followed by Jen and Elise doing some shopping on/around Bond Street before we had our big event for the day - a showing of Frozen at the Drury Lane Theatre. Elise was blown away and the musical was better than I had expected. A great weekend was topped off with dinner at Flat Iron Covent Garden.
Monday we departed our hotel for King’s Cross station, from which we took a 9 am train to Edinburgh. I spent most of the ride working but the bits of countryside I got to see once we were north of Newcastle were beautiful. Arriving at the Waverly Street station around 1 pm, we walked to our hotel and dropped off our luggage before spending the rest of the afternoon walking around the old city and the Royal Mile.
I’ve never been to Edinburgh and it is one of the most striking cities I’ve ever visited. The architecture, statues, and open spaces all create a really amazing atmosphere, with the castle looming over the city. It was really fun to just walk around and take in the history. That night Jen found a neat seafood restaurant to cap the day off.
Tuesday we started the day with a trip to the Edinburgh Zoo. Elise’s favorite stuffed animal is a little panda we picked up at Target, I think (though she also frequently renames it - it’s been “Panda”, “Love Panda” and “Love Bamboo” in just the last month). This meant that the pandas at the Edinburgh Zoo were a big deal for her, but we spent several hours taking as much of it in as we could. It’s a beautiful location, really well laid out with a wide range of animals. Some of the bird exhibits were restricted as a result of avian flu, but otherwise, it was really great. Of course, the pandas were the high point and luckily we caught one of them happily eating away at bamboo and, to make it even more silly for Elise, one of them produced a very tightly packed piece of panda poop while we were watching. It was very edifying.
We proceeded to grab lunch at the zoo before heading off to a more adult activity - Jen had found a Scotch whiskey-tasting experience and gotten us tickets. It was a nice overview of the regions of Scotland (for whiskey) and then a tasting of a handful of different brands (the experience was run by Diageo so I’m certain that while the names were all new to me that the whiskeys fit under their umbrella). Elise again helped out as best she could, quickly raising her arm when the tour guide asked “Who likes Irish whiskey?” It was a lot of fun.
Wednesday we took the train back down to King’s Cross before settling in at our hotel. Between our arrival and dinner, we walked around a bit to Selfridge’s and then ended up back at the room as Elise was starting to show some fatigue from a long week.
Thursday we had a 1440 flight out of Heathrow so outside of some exercise and packing, we had little to do in the morning before the long flight home (LHR-BOS, BOS-DCA).
Overall it was a really good trip. Nice to get back over to the UK and spend some time with the family. At the same time, traveling with little ones is exhausting, so I’m kind of ready for some routine back home.