Rainy London

 A full English is always a good way to start the day! At this hotel, kids eat free, so it was too good a deal to pass up.

After this feast, we got out my umbrella (yes, the weather forecast of 100% chance of rain  was all too accurate) and headed down to the pier to catch the boat to Westminster and Big Ben. On the way down, we stopped in at a souvenir shop so the girls could buy their own London-themed umbrellas.

As you can see, the boat trip was not overly popular today!

We got off the boat at Westminster Pier, where the girls were thrilled to see Big Ben and to show off their new umbrellas. It was really quite a miserable day, so we just wandered around a little bit here before getting on the "Big Bus".

Before this trip, I had never ridden on a Hop-On, Hop-Off bus, but I thought that with the girls, it might be a good idea. Normally I walk or ride a bike everywhere, but I wasn't sure whether they would be up for that, and I thought having the option of the bus might be good. For both London and Paris, the ticket included the boat ride as well, which seemed like a good deal. 

Although the boat rides were nice, overall, I think the bus is a bit of a rip-off. When I had seen the buses on previous trips (as a person without a ticket), I thought they were everywhere and frequent, but when you actually want to ride one, it is a bit of a different story. First, you can only ride the buses from the company whose ticket you purchased. So, although there are lots of buses, there are not necessarily lots from Big Bus. The other thing is that they only come every half hour or so, meaning that if you miss the bus by a couple of minutes, you have to wait for the next bus to arrive. This makes it hard to plan your stops. To top it off, sometimes the bus that was scheduled doesn't arrive or arrives late. Finally, because I had spent a big whack of money on the bus tickets, I felt like I had to use them. 

In retrospect, maybe I should have just counted it a loss and we could have used the Underground more (we did use it quite a bit anyway). Chalk it up to lessons learned. In future, I will know better!

Buckingham Palace

We figured a rainy day was a good day for a visit to Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station. Since Zoe loves all things Harry Potter, she was thrilled with this. I think she could have spent all day in here. There is also a place where you can take a photo with a luggage cart going through the brick wall (I had no idea what this was about until I watched the first movie on the plane on the way home), but there was a long queue for this, and Zoe didn't want to wait.

The rain had stopped, so we decided to go to Hyde Park and rent bikes. 

Was I ever surprised when we got off the bus at Marble Arch. First, Marble Arch was not even visible, as it was completely covered with scaffolding for reconstruction work. 

Nor was Hyde Park visible. Instead, there was a big green fence all around, above which we could see fair rides. It turned out this was a big Christmas fair. At first the girls were excited, but then we saw that admission to the fair was £10 and rides were also £10 each. Since the girls had limited funds, and I wasn't keen on paying that much, we decided it was too rich for our blood.

But, I assured them, we could still rent bikes and enjoy a ride in the other part of the park. It took a bit of walking, but we finally found a bike stand and began to rental process, only to find that kids have to be 14 or older to rent the bikes. This was a big disappointment, but of course, there was nothing we could do about it.

Because the fair took up so much of the park, we had to walk quite a distance before seeing anything, but we did manage a short walk, including Wellington Arch. By this time it was getting quite dark, so we found our Big Bus and rode back to the hotel.