Going to London

After a great deal of checking the weather forecasts and fretting about what to pack, we set off on Tuesday 25th June from Edinburgh to London, travelling with East Coast rail in a first class carriage.  On reaching Waverley Station, the train was in the station so we quickly boarded and found our seats to settle in for the journey.  I love travelling down the east coast line, in particular crossing the Border Bridge at Berwick-on-Tweed.  Unfortunately, the weather was a little gloomy, but I did manage to take two reasonable photos out of the train through a dirty window!!

I must say that the service from the catering staff on the way down was second to none!  We were in the 'quiet' carriage, but folks must have wondered about the four of us having such a great time the whole way from Edinburgh down to London - the celebrations had started early!!

On reaching Kings Cross in London the weather had cheered up somewhat and we jumped into a taxi to our hotel - the Best Western Hotel, Shaftesbury, London.  It looked nice on arrival, but on being allocated our club rooms that we had paid extra for, we found that they were in the basement!!  Whoever heard of paying extra for rooms in a basement that are dark and dingy and need the lights on at all times!!  Absolutely shocking.  Anyway, within five minutes of us arriving in our rooms, reception were on the phone asking if the rooms were OK, almost as if they were expecting us to complain.  Well, they weren't disappointed.  We told them the rooms weren't acceptable and they showed us another one, but even though advertised as a supposedly more spacious club room, there was no room to swing a cat and the shower cubicle was tiny, so that room wasn't accepted either.  If that's the size of a club room, I'd hate to see the size of the regular rooms.  They must be positively claustrophobic!  So, it was back to reception again and this time they gave us keys to view rooms across the road from the hotel.  This time, the rooms were marginally better as they had a little more space and larger shower cubicles, so we accepted them.  However, they still bore no resemblance to photos on the internet of their supposed club rooms.  I still think they have had a joiner go round and screw club room nameplates onto all the room doors in the hotel!!  Also advertised as part of the club room package are wine, flowers and chocolates and a photo suggests a lovely vase of flowers, a normal size bottle of bubbly and a box of chocolates, but what you really get is a wee vase with two carnations, two mini bottles of wine and a chocolate for each of you at turndown service!!  Very disappointing indeed.  I made sure that my TripAdvisor review reflected all of that and more, and I also complained to Booking.com who we made the reservations with.  Hopefully by doing that it may save other people the misery of having to stay in a basement room.

Anyway, putting all of that behind us, we eventually unpacked and set off to explore the area and found that we weren't too far from Hyde Park, so we had a wander through there - it was just beautiful.  You could never guess that this haven of tranquility was right in the heart of London!!  It was just teeming with wild flowers, animals and birds.  I could have stayed there and explored for a whole day!!

Here are some photos taken there: 

The Serpentine

Think this is a grebe - it had just eaten a crayfish!!

The Serpentine

Wild flowers

Heron looking for his tea!

We stopped at The Lido for a Pimms which was very pleasant then we walked back to the hotel before looking for somewhere to have dinner.  After finding a nice Italian restaurant we had dinner there before walking back to the hotel to have a small nightcap with some of our favourite tipple that we had bought at a nearby supermarket. 

It was then off to bed so that we were refreshed for the next day's sightseeing.