Myself and my beautiful wife Lindsay spent this weekend in our capital city London, it was only because when I sorted out our journey to the Conference on the 5 Year Plan in January I messed up some dates when booking (typical of me) so we had a hotel room sitting spare. So we booked up some Megabus.com tickets (£4.50 return for both of us, yay!) and set off on Friday for a nice weekend.
So off we set at 1:15am on Saturday to get the overnight bus from Newcastle Central Station to London Victoria, and we arrived just after 7am. So with a little time to kill before things opened up we headed off to Victoria Mall to grab a quick breakfast from McDonalds (gotta love the Egg McMuffin!). And then off we went, unlike the past few weeks Saturday was miserable weather wise and it was quite damp, but not overly so and we had a nice comfortable temperature to walk in. So off we walked from Victoria up Buckingham Palace Road to see the Palace. got some nice pictures and then had a wander up The Mall, it was a dress rehearsal for the Trooping of the Colour that day so it was actually quite busy along with the D-Day stuff going on as well.
From Admiralty House we then made our way to Trafalgar Square and messed about a bit while we waited for the National Gallery to open so we could have a look at some old masters as well as some Picasso’s. Got to see Sunflowers by Van Gogh for the first time in my life so I felt very lucky, its a wonderful vibrant painting and its almost like it wants to leap off the canvas at you. However I must admit the rest of the collection does tend to feel a bit samey to me and much of it was lost on me.
From The National Gallery we headed up past St Martins in the Field towards Covent Garden where we enjoyed some lovely Paella and had a nice gander at some of the interesting shops around the market. Following this we had lunch at Walkabout, thanks to some vouchers (Thank you Martin Lewis!) we enjoyed burger, chips and coke for less than the price of a single burger without drink (score!).
We then wandered down towards Parliament and saw the Tamil Protest on Parliament Square and took some photos of the area, was quite busy round there but considering the current domestic political situation I am not that surprised. After that we were completely knackered so we decided to head to our hotel and hopped on the tube following a visit to the tinniest Tesco in the world (at least that I have found).
Our hotel was in Park Royal in Acton and I must say it was not a great hotel, it was right next to a very busy road, and it stated it had triple glazing, but one of the panels was missing and thus it was rendered useless so you could hear the road all night and that kept me awake somewhat. We walked over to the Park Royal Leisure Park opposite and had a Pizza Hut for tea and decided to go see the new Terminator Movie, which is actually very good. After that we headed back to our hotel room and got some sleep.
The next day was different, we had decided to visit the Guardians Resting place in North London, so we wandered over to Park Royal tube station and realised we had to cross almost the entire Piccadilly line to get to Arnos Grove, so were on the Tube an hour when we got to Turnpike Lane and were told to get off the train as a fella had gone under a train at a station a just up the line,I later learned through my Auntie Debra who works for the Underground that he died, a real shame, I am keeping the train driver in my prayers as I have seen what this kind of incident can do to the driver.
So we were thee we were in Haringey with no idea where to go, we asked the lady at the ticket office who told us we should get the 184 bus to Arnos Grove. So we raced up the stairs and saw a 184 there and we got it the queue, but just as we were about to board the lass driving the bus closed the doors on us and drove away leaving us and several others to wait for the next bus.
Not sure of what to do and feeling hungry we quickly grabbed some lunch and just made it in time for the next 184 which took just over half an hour to get us to Arnos Grove where we were able to rush down to the Guardians Resting Place, something I will talk about in another entry.
After this we had to rush back up the hill to get the 184 back to Turnpike Lane, so that we could get the tube to Victoria and the bus home, we managed it but we barely minutes to spare. We then had a nice journey home, well apart from the couple in front of us who reclined their seats and jammed my knee up.
All in all it was a lovely weekend and you can have a look at our pictures if you want.
Have Fun
Michael
