Christmas trip to London 2021

This morning was a chance for me to have a bit of a lie in after the early start yesterday. We had a quiet morning, I did get up a bit early and read the paper for a bit before Kathryn got up at about 9am. We had a quiet morning before heading out for a walk. We just needed to be out of the room for a bit to allow for it to have its daily service. These are the flowers that we beginning to open. We walked back over the Knightsbridge to buy dinner for later. We had planned to go to the restaurant in the hotel, but instead thought we should just have dinner in the room. We popped into a coffee shop on the way back that I had thought looked okay. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was actually pretty good, which doesn’t always happen. More often than not it’s a disappointment. On the prentious scale, they scored points for not having a menu, but ordering “two long blacks” had the intended outcome. We stood at the end of the counter and then headed back to the room. We had a bit of a re...

Saturday morning meant an early start to head off to the nearest parkrun. I have really enjoyed using them as a means to explore an area, and today was no exception. It was quite far to the nearest one, about 3 miles. Presumably because most parks in central London are privately owned. I had to run through Kensington and then Fulham to reach Fulham Palace on the banks of the river Thames. Running that early on the morning meant the streets were pretty quiet. I followed a runner but then lost him and then got lost myself. A quick correction using the phone got my back in track. I past Stamford Bridge on my way. Coincidentally, I spotted that they were playing Leeds today! The parkrun had advertised for volunteers yesterday and so I needed to be there for 8:30am to check in as I was going to do barcode scanning for them after I had finished. Thankfully, on arriving at the park I quickly found the florescent signs and found the start/finish. Second football ground of the day, Craven Cotta...

We were greeted with a beautifully sunny day on Friday morning. I was up early and we had plenty of time to walk up to the station and get the train. Amazingly, another thing was the trains were on time. I had time at Leeds to go out and grab a coffee. These were the views from Kings Cross when we arrived. Getting through London was fine, not too busy. Things have changed a fair bit. One thing is not using Oyster cards anymore, and instead using just plain old regular contactless payment. Before long we were in South Kensington. More good fortune, we were actually able to check straight into our hotel at midday. So we were able to dropped our bags and go out and get some lunch. We picked up some flowers too from a florist by station to take back to the room. We are staying in a suite to try and minimise contact with other people. Feels a bit strange typing that. The room has a separate bathroom and also a lounge area with kitchenette. This means we can get food to eat in the room. We a...