A Travel Blog
For dinner, we took the Tube to the Kings Cross area of London, which is currently undergoing massive redevelopment to convert former industrial areas into public squares, parks, offices and restaurants.
A vibrant new public square has been constructed along Regent’s Canal, which was formerly used to ship materials to and from the factories that lined the banks.
40 minutes by train from central London, near the town of Milton Keynes, is Bletchley Park. If you’ve seen The Imitation Game movie, you’ll know Bletchley Park was a WWII site where secret codebreaking work was completed.
Some estimate this decoding of Nazi radio transmissions shortened the war by years and saved millions of lives.
May 20, 2016 is our 10th wedding anniversary. Josie had always wanted to see Oxford, having read many books and watched many dramas set in that town. This seemed like a perfect reason to take a train and get out of London for the day.
The trip from Paddington Station to Oxford took 56 minutes and cost us £25 (about $50 CAD) each, return. We enjoyed random views of the lush English countryside from the window of our train.
We usually steer clear of obvious tourist traps while traveling, but some places, like The Tower of London, are world-famous and perpetually jammed with visitors for a good reason.
I had visited the Tower in the late 90’s, but Josie had never been, and since we both have an interest in history it was an easy decision to visit again.
One thousand years of colourful and gory history is an easy sell.
It was a stereotypically grey English morning when we headed down to the River Thames at Bankside, not far from our hotel. We descended to Bankside Pier at river level where we purchased tickets for the Thame’s Clipper boat service, which would take us a few miles southwest to the Millbank Pier.
Despite the risk of rain, it seemed a more scenic way to travel than taking the Tube, and it gave us a close-up view of one of the world’s most famous rivers in all its grey-green muddy glory.
One of our first stops in Soho was the Algerian Coffee Stores on Old Compton Street, which has been around since 1887. The decor is a mix of Victorian and modern. They sell roughly 80 types of coffee beans, as well as tea and chocolate. There are no tables, but they’ll pull you a shot of espresso for £1 to drink while standing. I had one and it was delicious.
Ye Olde Mitre is a pub in the Holborn district of London, hidden at the end of an alley that extends from a gated laneway near the Chancery Lane tube stop. It’s closed on weekends.
One of the oldest in London, this pub dates to the time of Queen Elizabeth I. “Built in 1546 and extended in 1782” says the website. Rather than a single room, the pub is more like a warren of small cozy rooms, with two levels and a courtyard.
The other customers mostly seemed to be suited regulars on their lunch breaks.
We are staying in the Southwark/Bankside area of London, which is on the southern side of the Thames, about a ten-minute walk east of Waterloo Station. It’s a former industrial area that’s become trendy over the past few decades, but many signs of its grittier past remain, including numerous arched brick railway overpasses.
We are staying at the CitizenM hotel, the London offshoot of an Amsterdam-based chain.
The hotel is very hip and modern with hi-tech rooms where all the lights, television, blinds, heat, wake-up alarms and other things are controlled via tablet app. There is a distinct lack of stuffiness, with efficient friendly service and minibar fridges stocked with free (non-alcoholic) beverages and snacks that are replenished each day.
On our way to London, we took advantage of the Icelandair stopover option, which lets you extend a short changeover at the Reykjavik airport into a stay of up to 7 days for no extra airfare. We took two full days, spending the first day in Reykjavik, then taking a Golden Circle bus tour on the second day.
Our overnight flight landed very early, so we dropped our bags at the hotel and headed out to explore drizzly Reykjavik in a haze of jetlag. Impossible to miss almost anywhere in the city is Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland. It took 41 years to build, with construction starting in 1945 and ending in 1986.
It cost 900 ISK (about $9) to go up the tower in an elevator, where we were rewarded with photogenic views of otherwise low-rise Reykjavik.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
We stayed at Hotel East Houston (since renamed the Edge Hotel as of 2017) for the first time. This is the view of the hotel from the north side of Houston St. It’s very close to lots of trendy neighbourhoods, but still maintains a bit of grit through its proximity to the Lower East Side, Houston Street and the Bowery.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
The view up Elizabeth Street from our hotel room. We stayed at the Nolitan Hotel for the second trip in a row. It’s in Nolita (aka “North of Little Italy) and is pretty much on the boundary between SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy and the Lower East Side. It’s a great central point with good access to multiple subway lines.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
The Leadbelly on Orchard Street, a bar snacks and mixed drink joint on a somewhat deserted stretch of Chinatown. We enjoyed some excellent oysters at ludicrously cheap buck-a-shuck prices, which worked out well since the rest of their menu was on the expensive side.