London

Ian has been away all week with important work:

So I thought that I would take the kids on an adventure to London! It almost didn't happen - a freak rainstorm (requiring changing of all clothes down to underwear) delayed us on the way to the station, but we did manage to catch our train. Thanks to Nathaniel's running, we actually had 5 minutes to spare, but the train was late anyway......

The kids made up for my grumpiness towards the couple who sat in our seats and declined to move by being charming and playing nicely and holding adult conversations with the surrounding passengers.

And then as the train emptied out, played jungle explorers down the carriage (complete with swinging from vines) until they hurt themselves and I got disapproving looks from people!

Nimmy and James kindly met us from the train and helped us home and the kids enjoyed their transport options as usual.

The next day Nathaniel planned a complicated route through London using the most amazing number of different tube lines.

It all came a bit unstuck when he got totally overwhelmed by Baker Street station, but we managed to press on by a new route which was fortunate, otherwise we would have never accidentally run into the Lord Mayor's Show parade!

The Butchers

My favourites were the Modern Livery Companies (I enjoyed the accountants), and no-one forgot the farmers!

Then we got to our goal - the DLR - and managed to get the front seats so we could pretend to be train drivers all the way to Greenwich.

We had some lunch and a brief play in the Maritime Museum (just enough to make us want to come back to do it properly), and then decided we were exhausted and went home! The important thing was that Thea got to do lots of Tube surfing (which she is pretty good at), and everyone got their fix of interesting stations (I like Canary Wharf) and trains (many, many metropolitan line trains!).

The next day we got to Kings Cross early enough to have coffee in sight of the Eurostar trains and the rather fine architecture which everyone was pleased about.

And then we went home. For about 2 hours. After which we needed more stations, so we went back to pick up Ian!

Sorry about the blurry pictures - not entirely sure about my new phone's camera yet......