I realise that as we left Spain, I didn’t actually finish the blog series of our journey (whoops). So in short, we left the fab 4 and headed to Haro in the Rioja region, a lovely town with lots of wine houses and tapas; stocked the van with wine and found our way to Bilbao. The ferry home was a little rougher when we first sailed than on the way out, but soon calmed down and we had a great crossing. It feels like a lifetime ago! So that’s the ‘returning’ from Spain.
However, the ‘returning’ I was thinking about as I titled this blog was returning to London. To be frank it was Spain summer temperatures as we arrived, so maybe it flows well from our last trip away.
We wouldn’t normally head to London in school summer holidays, or high temperatures, but this was a special trip. The start of this Agy on Tour trip was about some very special people who have welcomed us, guided us and supported us as we found our feet moving to the Island. If you’ve been to visit us, I’m sure you met Nigel, Laura and Bruno, if not, you need to come back for longer next time, so you do.
This was their first holiday in a long time, and Brono had chosen London as their destination. Having confidence in our superior knowledge of the whole of London (we’d clearly slightly overstated our local knowledge!) asked for some suggestions of things to do - to which we responded “shall we come too?” So we found ourselves in London, in 30+degrees, missing the sea breeze we've become accustomed to, but surrounded by trees and wildlife at Abbeywood Campsite, not far from where we used to live.
We packed our week together with firsts for Bruno, and a few for the rest of us too. Most of my photos seem to be of everyone else, but that’s OK, this week wasn’t about us, so here is a selection of the week's events!
A trip to the O2 via the cable car, finishing with Virtual darts(with real darts). I was hopeless, with the occasional bullseye!
Tower Bridge, The Ivy for lunch.
The Elizabeth Line and mainline train (minus photos).
A few theatre based events Hadestown - which has a cult following, but we really didn’t enjoy, mainly due to the casting
and the Theatre Café Diner - which we loved, it was amazing! If you haven’t been and love musicals, you must go! It is closing in its current location, but I understand it has another location in the planning. The waiting staff are all aspiring West End actors, swings or understudies and every so often perform songs from the musicals, usually requested by the diners on the requests board. They were fabulous! It shows how unfair the profession is, several of them we so much better than the actors we’d seen the night before. They absolutely deserve their big break! We know it does happen as one of the former singers is now on stage in a big show, but it felt as if they really all should have a part on stage. They were great at everything they did and the food was great too… they had to kick us out at closing time!
Afternoon tea at County Hall for Laura and I, and several other venues with no photos, some we went to and others we didn’t as we’d already been . The British museum, The Imperial War museum. The Tower of London, The London Dungeon and a hop on hop off bus to the museum’s in Kensington.
We did also manage to squeeze in a visit to see Rachel and Tony we talked too much to take a photo, (but here's one from a previous visit, eek, was this one we said we wouldn't share?? Sorry Rachel, it just made me smile...) but had a wonderful time.
Leaving London and Nigel, Laura and Bruno to head back to the Island, we started the next stage of our journey via our former local Woolwich ferry. Although our destination for this trip is slightly north of London, we did head east for a fabulous to visit Mary and Ray (again no photos, possibly caused by a lot of ‘catching up’ for Mary and I, which made Ray laugh “how can you find so much to talk about for so long? “). Oh Ray, we could keep going for hours!
*photos all shared with permission, except the one of Rachel and I, but I'm sure she won't mind :-)
