Ladies Do London - Xmas Fun
The adventures of the Fab Four continue - and I was buzzing for this one. The previous episodes include Edinburgh 2012, Dublin 2014 and Liverpool 2015. We had talked about potential trips earlier on in the year - but life for all of us got in the way. With this in mind we decided that maybe we could just have a Christmas celebration instead - combining some festive fun with a catch up for us all!
Bright an early Saturday morning four of us headed by train to London. It was a direct train to London and took us around an hour and ten minutes to get there. Luckily there were no engineering works this weekend so no disruptions for our adventure. From what started out as a possible trip to listen to some Christmas carols our adventure had turned into a full weekend of fun. The fab thing about the fab four is that we get a little bit carried away!
Out starting location was home for the weekend. I need to get the full details from my friend and will add the link in due course. The link is important as the accommodation for the weekend was amazing! Home consisted of an apartment on the edge of Hyde Park. It was a one bedroom flat with an additional sofa bed in the lounge. Fantastic location and fantastic price - £50 pp per night.
From our apartment it took us around 20 minutes walk across Hyde Park to the Natural History Museum. We only had one reason for coming here and it was not exactly festive! Dippy the Dinosaur is due to leave the Natural History Museum next year and this is the last time we would get to see him.
Dippy (although not even a real set of dinosaur bones) has been there ever since we were all children. This therefore was our last chance to visit it! Dippy will be replaced by a whale bone structure shortly so I was over the moon to get a final photo to remember how it used to be.
Although happy to see Dippy I had forgotten how beautiful the main hall of the museum was. The architecture was amazing and I tried to capture the full impact of the room in the photo above.
It would have been rude to not visit the souvenir shop on our way out. We are suckers for a cuddly toy. I also ended up purchasing a new member of our family. He will now forever be known as ' REX'. He would be joining us on the balance of our adventure - especially with his festive attire!
The journey must go on though as we had lots of actual festive plans while in London Town. We headed out the Natural History Museum and located some mulled wine to start as we meant to go on. The wine was super tasty and from a local stall next to the ice skating rink. We were due to go skating for an hour shortly and the mulled wine warmed us up before to took on the chill. We booked the skating through the following link - 'Natural History Museum Ice Rink'.
You need to turn up roughly 40 minutes prior to your designated ice skating session. On first arrival I thought this was rather premature as there were hardly any people in the waiting room. We easily picked up the skates and pottered to the entrance of the ice rink to wait our time slot. While waiting it quickly became clear why you needed to get their early. The mass of people waiting to get on the rink increased significantly and we were certainly lucky to be at the front of the crowd. They people soon dispersed once we were allowed on the rink.
You need to be fairly steady on your ice skates however - there was limited ability to skate round holding on to the side barrier. You need to brave it in the more central section of the rink to avoid too many people. The bonus of this rink however is the location. The backdrop was the Natural History Museum and there was a beautiful Christmas Tree dressed by Swarovski which glimmered against the ice rink. Perfect Christmas setting!!!!!!
The main event was next! This was my first ever visit to the Royal Albert Hall and it certainly didn't let down my expectations. I obviously had seen it on TV, but until I was in the building I had no concept of the size. The building was beautiful and I spent the half hour in the lead up to the event watching everyone come in and the venue fill up
Now the event we went to was known as the Christmas Carol Singalong. The basis is that we all get a song sheet and we join in with the official choir and the orchestra for a good old singalong. I was sceptical at first about the ' singalong' bit as I am 100% awful at singing. I don't think however I realised how much other stuff would be going on in addition to the singing.
The singalong took around two hours, with a short interval in the middle. There are bars at the Royal Albert Hall, but be careful - some of these are very pricey. It is useful to also note that you are unable to take any glass into the main auditorium. This means that if you purchase a bottle of wine you need to get through it before the start of the show. We opted to one of the cheaper bars and had a cider - which we were able to take in for the show as they had plastic pint glasses. We believe from some further research however that if you have a box you can pre-order drinks to the box and these can be consumed during the show.
We had lots of fun and despite my inability to sing I gave it my best shot and when I could hear I sounded awful I decided to just bop about and dance along with the festive tunes. I had so much fun and would certainly go back again - have been convincing everyone else to attend next year!
We wandered down the road through Hyde Park to reach London's Winter Wonderland. I had previously been a few years ago - and it has several Christmas stalls - a fun fair - an ice show and many other side attractions. This year however it had grown immensely and there were soooooooo many people. It was a bit packed and we could hardly even see what was on the stalls. I know that some people love big over commercialised events - but this was too much for me! We wandered around for a bit, but didn't even get a drink due to the sheet volume of people. I took a few pictures though and it did look pretty, but I think I will reserve my Christmas markets for Europe rather than risking this venue again.
It was so bad we decided to retreat to our apartment and continue the Christmas festivities with wine, snacks and Christmas tunes. We even had some Christmas presents to get us in the mood.
The next day we decided to be proper tourists and embarked on one mission alone! Yes to find out if Buckingham Palace put up Christmas decorations outside the Palace. We walked for what seemed like miles to get there and to our disappointment there was one little tree! Far from festive! A little bit more tinsel would not have gone a miss.
The weekend flew by, but it was amazing to get away and spend some time with the girls. It was a great catch up -filled with Christmas fun. It certainly got me in the mood for next weekend - the main event ' Christmas'. Lets hope 2017 brings another adventure for the fab four!