Day 4 – Wednesday 25 May 2016

A very lazy 8am buffet breakfast to start, then off for a walk through Hyde Park and past the Serpentine Lake to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Along the way we passed some very expensive real estate, a 3 bedroom apartment on Kensington Road, Knightsbridge, overlooking Hyde Park can be yours for a mere 18.5 million British Pounds. If that is too much you could settle for a 3 bedroom terrace nearby for 8.5 million British Pounds, or if you can’t quite get that sort of money together you could rent a 1 bedroom unfurnished apartment for 4,700 British Pounds per week.

The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is an amazing place & we recommend if you get to London it is a must see. The V&A is focused on art and has amazing displays of sculptures, including 14 Rodins, paintings, jewellery, furniture plus silver & gold tableware, religious artefacts and musical instruments, even a Stradivari violin (a shame it is not being used by a talented violinist). It is amazing, the skill of the artists leaves you wondering how they ever achieved anything so good. A highlight was seeing one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s original notebooks. The museum is so big it took us from 10am – 2.15 pm to barely skim through it, we really need to spend some days going through it. It is a place we want to go back to when we have more time.

On our walk back we stopped into Harrods to see what all the fuss is about. My goodness, if ever you want to spend some serious money, this is the place to do it at. Harrods is very large & is full of the high-end brands, covering jewellery, handbags, clothes, food & perfumes. If you ever want to spend some serious money on food, you can buy some Japanese Wagyu beef for 480 British Pounds (A$960) per kilo. Or you can go cheap & buy Australian Wagyu for 295 British Pounds (A$590) per kilo. There was an exquisite butterfly necklace & broach set at Tiffany’s but we were in a hurry & Tereza didn’t have the time to try it on (they had no price on it & if you have to ask how much it costs usually you can’t afford it). We left Harrods empty handed but only because we were in a hurry.

We continued our stroll back through Hyde Park, stopping to watch some red squirrels, then walked along Park Lane in Mayfair (Monopoly players will know these names). Here you can get a 4 bedroom terrace house for a mere 16.5 million British Pounds, they don’t look anything special from the outside. We stopped at the Grosvenor Hotel on Park Lane for Queen Elizabeth’s 90^th Birthday Celebration High Tea. This establishment is very swish, you need to be sitting down when you are reading the prices for afternoon tea. We had a couple of glasses of champagne, an endless pot of very nice tea from a huge selection on offer plus finger sandwiches, scones with jam & clotted cream & to finish it off a selection of exquisitely (some decorated with gold leaf) presented (tiny) delicious sweet treats. We were even treated to the Queens favourite biscuit (so we were told & who are we to question this?). We spent about 2 hours indulging & found it very hard to stand up, we are blaming it on all the walking & so much food, not the champagne. What is Ron doing? My afternoon tea (a person who up until now did not drink coffee or tea) standards have been raised, I am expecting this sort of indulgence every time now!

Back to our motel & more indulgence with a long hot bath to round the day out & soak our weary feet & legs after so much walking.

The Amba (old Thistle) hotel is getting refurbished, the dining room is still the old one, the rooms are finished. The WOW factor is it’s closeness to the city & things tourists “must see”, then there is the price they charge for the rooms (expensive).