Due to Alkaline Trio concert visits I was London bound twice in the last 12 months. The original concert date would have been November, but as Matt Skiba broke his ankle I pretty much had 3 days in London and booked another flight for the rescheduled date on 10th May.
In November we stayed in Fielding Hotel in Covent Garden. Fielding is a small hotel that offers no breakfast and I guess is mostly booked by business people. The rooms in Fielding are huge compared to everything else I so far experienced in London and they were clean and comfortable. Staff was overall nice and I can really recommend it to any travelers that don’t want breakfast in the hotel.
For May I booked a different hotel. By chance I ended up with Double Tree by Hilton, West End which offered breakfast and had restaurant and bar included in the hotel. It’s located near Russell Square / Holborn and so it’s in the middle of the city as well. Double Tree was an overall good choice, clean rooms, nice staff and an incredible breakfast which we didn’t generally book but add for 2 days.
As there was no Alkaline Trio tour in November plans grew for a tour trip outside London on one of the days and as I had never been to Stonehenge before I decided that would be the place to go. Booking took place in the Tourist Information and I learned that I was more or less too late with my tour wishes. Most of the tours were already booked out and so I finally ended up with a tour offering „Stonehenge & Bath“ in small groups. The companies name was : Anderson Tours.
Indeed we were a small group of only 5 plus guide and were traveling in a small bus. First stop was Stonehenge where we had more than 2 hours time to take pictures and walk around the ancient stones. The entrance fee was included in the tour price. From Stonehenge we went to Bath, which we reached about lunch time. The tour included entrance fee for the the ancient bath and after that we were free to run around on our own and our guide just gave us some useful hints where to eat and where to go.
This time I tried booking a tour in advance. Advance means like 10 days before the flight and again I learned that I was a bit late. I wanted to see Stratford upon Avon and the tours going there were almost booked out completely for the date I wanted. I ended up choosing Premieretours that offered „Warwick Castle, Stratford upon Avon & Oxford“. The tour was quite expensive, but I learned during the day that this was probably due to the high entrance fees of Warwick Castle, Shakespeare’s birth house and Oxford’s Christ Church College. We travelled in a huge buss and the group was about 20 people. I must admit I really regret booking it afterwards. It was a rush all day. We had like 45 min in Warwick Castle and 30 minutes in Stratford upon Avon before our buss drove to have lunch in a pub our guide recommended and which turned out to be in the middle of nowhere so that we more or less had no choice than having our lunch there. Lunch time was 35 minutes which meant for me that I left half of my desert back there and overall I can say that it was neither good nor cheap at all. It was pretty expensive for the quality offered and I guess that it includes extra money for the guide. From that pub we drove to Oxford where we more or less ran through a tiny part of Christchurch College and afterwards were guided to city centre where we had 25 minutes free time. It turned out that Oxford is a beautiful city and the colleges are awesome so I can only recommend to spend a whole day in Oxford and I can say that 25 minutes were just enough to enter a fudge kitchen and afterwards see a toilet.
The pictures of London Tower are from November, Buckingham Palace was in May. I have no idea why the guards were marching that day and my friend CJ didn’t know as well so I guess it’s related to the fact that Queen Elizabeth has her 60 years throne jubilee in 2011.
One evening we had diner in the „Spaghetti House“ near Holborn station and I can absolutely recommend it. Even though it was full and we hadn’t reserved a table they somehow managed to find a place for us. The meals were perfect and the service was awesome. Only that I’d recommend everybody to book a table beforehand!
