Our trip to London came about due to a promotion British Air ran in Fall 2011, where the purchase of tickets to certain cities would give you two free nights at selected hotels. Since BA codeshares with American Airlines we could take the direct RDU-London flight — how could we resist? Quite simply, we couldn’t, and we booked a three night trip to London for mid-February.
Flying over Wednesday night we landed Thursday morning to a partly sunny London. A 30 minute tube ride to Earl’s Court and a 1 block walk had us the K+K Hotel George. Since it was only 8:30 am our room wasn’t ready but they offered us a complimentary breakfast. Yes please! Over breakfast we mapped out our day and decided to head to St. Paul’s Cathedral, then walk across the Millennium footbridge to the Tate Modern.
Due to work on the tube we ended up getting off at the Covent Gardens stop- this was fortuitous, as there was a last minute theater ticket office outside the station. Leandra ducked in and found that tickets for Wicked were both available and cheaper than the traveling show coming through Durham later this year. A few minutes later we walked out our evening planned.
From Covent Garden we walked toward St.Paul’s taking in the London streets…
St.Paul’s is imposing, as is the entrance fee (£14), so we walked around the outside taking photos.
The Millennium bridge is directly south so we walked across the Thames to the Tate Modern.
We were quite excited to visit the Tate Modern, but ended up disappointed in the current pieces. Outside of one Lichtenstein and two other pieces the rest of the art was quite forgettable.
Tired, we headed back to the hotel to get our room and take a much needed nap.
Feeling better we headed back out to Cask, a craft beer pub. We found that they had an interesting mix of beers from the UK, US and Belgium, including Jai Alai from Cigar City in Tampa on draught and a few North Carolina bottles from Duck Rabbit.
Unfortunately for us, their kitchen didn’t open until 6 (and were slammed when they opened, which was not a surprise), so we only had time for some fries before we had to leave for our show.
Around 7p we headed to the Apollo Victoria Theater across from Victoria Station for Wicked. Both lead actresses had amazing voices and the show was quite a bit of fun. We had picked up a few candy bars at the Mark & Spencer across the way before the show, so we could have dessert during intermission.
A tube station was just across the street from the theater, so a few stops later we were back to our hotel where we promptly collapsed after a very long first day in London.