It was a whirlwind. My parents came to visit for a week in June. The first time they came we had only been in London less than a year. We had really no idea about how the city worked. Well, more than three years have passed since that last visit, and we still don’t know how the city works… but we know a heck of a lot more now than we knew then. I learned more about London black cabs on this trip than I ever knew before as we black cabbed it around London for most of the holiday.
We did a few touristy things. We visited the many dead monarchs and one upright poet (o rare!) at Westminster Abbey with my favourite Abbey tour guide. We looked at a 5,000-year-old site featuring a pile of stones in the middle of nowhere at Stonehenge. We popped through the Cotswolds villages of Bibury, Burford, and Bourton-on-the-water. In Burford, Dad tried a few cask ales at the Cotswold Arms and Mum scored a pair of shoes on high street! We made a brief stop in at Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the homes of some writer or other. We also did a shopping day in London. We went to Lock & Co (very posh & very nice), Siggis Hats (won’t ever go there again), Gina Foster (also very nice), and M&S on Kensington High Street where Mum scored another pair of shoes! We made a brief visit at St Mary Abbots and sat for an hour in Kensington Gardens on the only sunny day of the trip.
For eats, we did one meal in our flat: I made Jerk Pork with Jamaican rice & peas and corn on the cob. All other meals were done at a mix of some of our favourite stops and some new favourites: O Fado in Knightsbridge, The Swan Hotel in Bibury, The Crypt in St-Martins-in-the-Fields, The Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge, Caffe Concerto in High Street Kensington, and Quantas in Chiswick. All were fabulous in their own way.
But of course the best part was having my Mum & Dad around all the time for a whole week! As a friend reminded me at work the other day, they are only a six hour flight away. It was wonderful.
Photo Credits
All Photos are from Wikipedia
