London Rain

Often, what we’ll try to do in a trip to London follows closely what we were unsuccessful organizing in the prior trip. I had hoped to visit the Sky Garden in our December trip, but hadn’t realized how much advance notice was required during the Festive Season. For this trip, I registered for a free visit to the Sky Garden as soon as we learned we could make the trip. In reality, very little advance planning would have been required because today was so rainy. I suspect many people decided not to bother. And for sure, it would have been a better experience with a clearer view. But it was still fun and I’m glad we got to do it. We learned that while the Sky Garden does indeed have a garden, the greater attraction is the view. The garden is on the 35th floor of a tower and you can see all of London on a clear day. On a not-at-all-clear day, I really enjoyed the view of The Tower of London.

We also scheduled lunch at the Piazza, the restaurant at the Opera House that has a balcony bar overlooking Covent Garden. In the cold and wet, the balcony was less of a draw, but we enjoyed a yummy lunch anyway. Covent garden market is mostly covered. While we normally are not big shoppers, we enjoyed ducking in out of the rain. I sampled some warm tea at the Wittard of Chelsea tea shop and bought some rose tea for my daughter.

On Sunday we had planned a day that included a return to Kew gardens, so I selected a pub in Brentford called the The Black Dog for Sunday roast. It was a 10-minute walk from a museum called the Musical Museum of London, where we started our day. The Musical Museum turned out to be mostly the collection of machines that made music started through the compilation of one man, Frank Holland. The collection includes a Wurlitzer museum organ, player pianos, and some of the most interesting music “boxes” I could ever have imagined, including huge ones that play drums, violins, horns. The museum holds music machines built since the 1700s, right up to the phonograph that first brought music machinery to the masses, a great many of them still functional. We enjoyed a wonderful tour of the museum given by Edward. Highly recommend.

Our Sunday roast was also delicious. The Black Dog was a friendly neighborhood pub. We had the roast beef.

Sadly, we had to cut our tour of Brentford short with no Kew gardens because the rain had become seriously aggressive. Given how we had hit the ground in London running, we were happy for an excuse to return to the hotel for a quick nap before heading out for dinner and going to the musical, Six, about the six wives of Henry VIII. It was a good musical to attend while jet lagged. Loud and energetic.

In our visits to London, we’ve rarely left town, but I had always wanted to visit the Cotswolds, a hilly and picturesque area about 2 hours away by car. I’m too much of a chicken to attempt to drive on the “other” side of the road, so I booked a tour with Viator. We’ve used Viator when traveling to other places when we’ve wanted mostly to plan for ourselves but sometimes pass the planning (and driving) off to someone else. Our tour was Monday, the only day since we’ve been in London that it didn’t rain. That was extremely lucky. Our tour went to Burford, Bibery, Bourton-on-the-Water, and Stow on the Wold. Our tour guide, David, was extremely knowledgeable about the area and, as it turned out, a wonderful jazz vocalist. We got him to play some of his music on the bus. We had time to walk, eat, and pub, and enjoy scenery on the nicest day of our visit.