London - 6th of September, 2025

 Hi All,

I'm a few days behind, so there's a lot to catch you up on!

I started early this morning, fully intending to do at least a half a day in Westminster Abbey and the rest at the Cabinet War Rooms (Churchill's HQ during WWII) but neither of those worked out. The advice I had that said if you get there early enough you won't have a problem getting in and won't have a queue was a big flop as both places said "All entry tickets for today sold out", so by 10am, having taken another 4,000 photos of Big Ben (yep, it still looks like it did 2,000 photos ago - Big Ben is my favourite!) I decided to switch my days and spent today in Harrods and Hyde Park. I walked from Westminster Abbey to Trafalgar Square, stopping to have a cup of tea at a cafe along the way. Wouldn't have done that at home, but this is London, so tea is a requirement. Walked right past the Royal HorseGuards and wandered through under the archways, not much to see but very interesting nonetheless to be able to picture where they are when I see anything HorseGuard-ian in future.

Met an Australian family at the bus stop and got chatting. We chatted while 4 scheduled Bus Number 9s came and went on the app, but we never saw any of them. The Transport app kept telling us "Bus approaching" and then "Bus departed" but none of us saw a single one, so eventually (40 minutes later) we gave up and all walked together to Piccadilly Circus to catch the tube to Harrods. How London am I?!

Harrods was amazing, but only sorta kinda in a good way. It was incredible but it was way too much. It's so unfathomably huge - and I don't know how they every make a single sale, everything was so expensive! Even so, it was absolutely jam-packed full of people. You could hardly move. There were queues just to walk down every single corridor. I saw barely any of it and was there for what felt like hours and hours and hours.

Christmas is out in full force at Harrods already, so I did buy a few christmassy things - I've only been here 4 days and I'm gonna need another suitcase.

The Food Halls were something else again. Can't believe places like this exist. To be honest, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. It was insane - and just way too over-stimulating. All the sights and the smells and the noise...it was like - I don't even know what it was like. Suffocating.

The cheese twist was pretty good though.

Spent the night on London's West End. I mean, why wouldn't you?? Went to see Les Mis (thank you Ian for the most wonderful birthday present 💕💗💋). Back to the Hotel at about 11pm, which is why the blogs have been sadly lacking. My feet were killing me after 24,000+ steps, but funnily enough by the time I woke up the next day, they were ready and raring to go again!