London Vacation Questions

Ever been? What things do you like to do?

You can easily spend several weeks based in London and not exhaust everything to see, especially if you include easy day-trips from the city....but it'll depend on what you enjoy.

Many sites and locations have limited or odd hours. For example St Paul or Westminster Abbey can be open only for a few hours a day. Day trips to Windsor castle, Hamptons court, or Bath considering they are only an hour or two away can take all day to explorer.

If you are at normal speed I would say 7-10 days for London. The tube and train system is extremely easy to navigate with each station having its own personality and feel

If you feel Adventurous, I highly recommend taking a train to Edinburgh in Scotland or York up north. If your into shopping and art take a bullet train to Paris.

I highly recommend multi-country which I would recommend London, Scotland, and Ireland.

If you plan around fall check out deals around thanksgiving. Not many Americans travel out of country at that time and I seen some amazing deals to London.

So there's 2 ways to see stonehenge... show up during public hours with all the tourists, and walk around it at a distance since it's roped off.

This method sucks.

The good method is you can book a special visit in the morning or evening before or after they open or close, where you get direct access inside the stones and it's limited to I think 20 or 30 total people.

It costs more, and involves scheduling far enough in advance, but it's vastly better. Especially if when you're going coincides with sunrise or sunset there.

https://www.english-heritage.org....ss-visits/


My advice if you want to do this is spend a day (or night) in Bath, which is fairly close and easily reached by train from London.... there's an awesome tour of the ancient roman baths to take, a nice abbey to see, lots of neat little shops, and 2 awesome places to eat I specifically suggest- Sally Lunn's (which is centuries old) and Yak Yeti Yak, which is the best Nepalese food I've ever had.



You'll also need to as mentioned coordinate when stuff is open in London, as some things do have odd hours (or odd days they're open or closed)... also take advantage of things like some places are open extra late on specific nights.


Here's a short, far from complete, list of awesome stuff to see in London...from the big and obvious to the smaller and odder-you should find enough to fill however long you go for



British Library (often with amazing special exhibitions)

Westminster Abbey (buy tickets online, you get to skip the often hour+ line that way)

Tower of London

St Pauls Cathedral (the first ever completed in the lifetime of its designer)

The Globe Theater (not original but they still do Shakepeare in the round)

Hampton Court Palace

Churchil War Rooms

Royal Observatory/Naval Museum/Cutty Sark at Grenenwich

National Gallery

Petrie Museum of Archeology (small but some neat stuff)

Museum of London

Windsor Castle (this is an easy day trip)

Sir John Soane's Museum (imagine a super rich guy who bought a ton of museum quality antiquity stuff to keep in every nook and cranny of his house and then said "Hey when I die, just open it up to the public and don't move anything")

Bletchley Park (this is a day trip outside London- but awesome if into WW2 history at all)

London Mithraeum (an undergrund ancient roman temple to mithras they found when excavating)

Kennsington Palace

The WB UK Studio tour (this is a day trip, or at least a half day trip, but AMAZING if you're Harry Potter fans)

The Wallace Collection (one of the largest collections of arms and armor in the world, plus a bunch of art too)

British Museum

Victoria and Albert Museum (which has several other nice museums like Natural History right next door)



Scotland is also awesome, but I would NOT suggest trying to see it in a couple of days. The one UK trip we included it in we did this:

Several day side trip to visit Cardiff and Bath (and stonehenge)
Couple days in London
A week in Scotland (we took the night train which I think doesn't run anymore to Edinburgh)- spent a day in Edinburgh, then rented a car and did a circle around the highlands to see Inverness, Culloden, Loch Ness, Isle of Sky, Ft William, and more...
Then another few days back in London

Likewise I wouldn't try and fit all of Ireland in in a couple days... though you could probably do the highlights of Dublin that way.


Our last UK trip was this:

Flew into Dublin, took a local hopper flight to London (to avoid the insane london airport taxes on domestic flights, plus we were using points on Aer Lingus)
Spent a week in London (and side trips based there)
Flew back to Dublin on hopper flight
Spent 2.5 days in Dublin
Flew back to US.

If you need stuff to see in Dublin let me know

So there's 2 ways to see stonehenge... show up during public hours with all the tourists, and walk around it at a distance since it's roped off.

This method sucks.

The good method is you can book a special visit in the morning or evening before or after they open or close, where you get direct access inside the stones and it's limited to I think 20 or 30 total people.

It costs more, and involves scheduling far enough in advance, but it's vastly better. Especially if when you're going coincides with sunrise or sunset there.

https://www.english-heritage.org....ss-visits/


My advice if you want to do this is spend a day (or night) in Bath, which is fairly close and easily reached by train from London.... there's an awesome tour of the ancient roman baths to take, a nice abbey to see, lots of neat little shops, and 2 awesome places to eat I specifically suggest- Sally Lunn's (which is centuries old) and Yak Yeti Yak, which is the best Nepalese food I've ever had.



You'll also need to as mentioned coordinate when stuff is open in London, as some things do have odd hours (or odd days they're open or closed)... also take advantage of things like some places are open extra late on specific nights.


Here's a short, far from complete, list of awesome stuff to see in London...from the big and obvious to the smaller and odder-you should find enough to fill however long you go for



British Library (often with amazing special exhibitions)

Westminster Abbey (buy tickets online, you get to skip the often hour+ line that way)

Tower of London

St Pauls Cathedral (the first ever completed in the lifetime of its designer)

The Globe Theater (not original but they still do Shakepeare in the round)

Hampton Court Palace

Churchil War Rooms

Royal Observatory/Naval Museum/Cutty Sark at Grenenwich

National Gallery

Petrie Museum of Archeology (small but some neat stuff)

Museum of London

Windsor Castle (this is an easy day trip)

Sir John Soane's Museum (imagine a super rich guy who bought a ton of museum quality antiquity stuff to keep in every nook and cranny of his house and then said "Hey when I die, just open it up to the public and don't move anything")

Bletchley Park (this is a day trip outside London- but awesome if into WW2 history at all)

London Mithraeum (an undergrund ancient roman temple to mithras they found when excavating)

Kennsington Palace

The WB UK Studio tour (this is a day trip, or at least a half day trip, but AMAZING if you're Harry Potter fans)

The Wallace Collection (one of the largest collections of arms and armor in the world, plus a bunch of art too)

British Museum

Victoria and Albert Museum (which has several other nice museums like Natural History right next door)



Scotland is also awesome, but I would NOT suggest trying to see it in a couple of days. The one UK trip we included it in we did this:

Several day side trip to visit Cardiff and Bath (and stonehenge)
Couple days in London
A week in Scotland (we took the night train which I think doesn't run anymore to Edinburgh)- spent a day in Edinburgh, then rented a car and did a circle around the highlands to see Inverness, Culloden, Loch Ness, Isle of Sky, Ft William, and more...
Then another few days back in London

Likewise I wouldn't try and fit all of Ireland in in a couple days... though you could probably do the highlights of Dublin that way.


Our last UK trip was this:

Flew into Dublin, took a local hopper flight to London (to avoid the insane london airport taxes on domestic flights, plus we were using points on Aer Lingus)
Spent a week in London (and side trips based there)
Flew back to Dublin on hopper flight
Spent 2.5 days in Dublin
Flew back to US.

If you need stuff to see in Dublin let me know

Thinking 8 nights in London. Fly direct from Boston though. Any good recommendations for hotel? Prefer not spending $300 a night, but want to be close to everything.

On our first trip we stayed here-

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel...gland.html

It's not "near" most of the tourist stuff, but it was a fairly nice room and hotel, and it's like 2 minutes from a tube station, which is pretty much the same thing. 15-30 minute tube trip to pretty much anything in London, and a lot less expensive than hotels that genuinely are "close to everything"


On another trip we stayed here, but only for a couple of nights, because we were going elsewhere in the UK and needed to be very close to Paddington to catch trains-
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel...gland.html

It was very nice, very well located, but significantly less cheap than the first place.


On our last trip we actually went with an air BnB in the south Kensington area (which was again nearer central london, was about a 5 minute walk to the tube) and the price was about the same as the Ibis place that was further away- and honestly we'd probably go the AirBnB route again in the future for any stays more than a couple of days as it seems you can get a location that a hotel would get 50-100% more for.

Among the bonuses to this route are we had a kitchen, since we were staying over the xmas/NYE holidays and couldn't always be sure of restaurants being open, plus easy storage/reheat of leftovers from restaurants... and we also had a washer/dryer in the flat so we could pack considerably lighter knowing we'd be able to do laundry while there.





Oh- one other note flying from Boston since it's relevant to something I mentioned and in case you happen to have access to a decent amount of Avios (or have time to rack some up with a credit card signup or two) you can get pretty nice business class fares with good availability to/from Boston and Dublin on Aer Lingus, then take a cheap hopper flight over to London to/from Dublin.

I'd never pay cash for biz, but paying points it's pretty awesome as compared to coach and I've flown that specific route (our two Aer Lingus Biz trips over to the UK were to/from Boston and Dulles).

Another really nice plus of doing that- you get to clear US customs in Ireland before you leave- when you land in the US you just exit the plane like a normal US domestic flight.

(and if you had a couple extra days you can also roll a free stopover in Dublin into the trip)

I chose to do this trip last fall: 2 nights London, 5 nights Oxford, 5 nights Galway, Ireland. Had a great time, and lucked out with mostly warm sunny weather (late Sep)

The reason I chose those locations was that I attended Oxford for a year when I was in college many years ago and wanted to re-visit. I also prefer mid-size towns over huge cities, so I also chose to visit Galway over Dublin. I had never been to Ireland, always wanted to go, and others told me Galway was a fun city to visit (it was) without being too big, and a nice gateway to the west of Ireland.

To get from London to Galway, we flew into Shannon and took a bus to Galway. I did not pre-book my flight to Ireland while in the US since I wanted to keep my options flexible. While in England, we were able to book cheap last-minute flights online from London to Shannon Airport via Ryanair. They have a bad reputation, but our flights were only $50 US R/T and we packed light carry-on luggage only. We had zero issues with the flights. They were on time and no surprises.

For you however, with 8 nights and it all being new to you, I would recommend staying in England, spending 3 nights/4 days in London to see the major sights (Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Tower of London, St. Paul's, Hampton Court Palace, etc.) and then exiting the city toward the end of Day 4 for the countryside. If Stonehenge is a must, then head west. Visit Oxford, Blenheim Palace, the Cotswolds, Stonehenge, and/or Bath depending on your interests.

Personally, Stonehenge for me was way overrated, and that was when you could just show up and climb all over if you wanted. But I get it, it's a bucket list thing for many people. The main thing is do what you enjoy, and don't try to do and see too much in a short time.

One suggestion is to pick one small city like Oxford or Bath as a home base, and explore from there daily. Or you can keep moving and stay somewhere new every night. I prefer the former, and then taking day trips from my home base, so I don't have to pack/repack and check-in/check-out somewhere new every day.

I used Airbnb for lodging. We lucked out staying next to the old medieval prison/castle in Oxford city centre, and in Galway city centre with a view overlooking the bay and city. Prices were moderate for the location, and the flats were clean and modern. In London, I simply booked a hotel room. Be prepared for sticker shock in London. It's a pricey place to stay and play.

If you decide that you must pop over to Ireland or north to Scotland, I would strongly suggest flying out of those areas directly back to the US rather than having to travel all the way back to London to return to the US. You will save a ton of time and hassle. So fly into London and out of Dublin or Shannon, or fly into London and out of Edinburgh or Glasgow for example. Or do the reverse route if that is cheaper and easier. Clearing customs in London can be a nightmare at times, while literally taking only minutes in an airport like Shannon due to differing processing policies.

Again, however, with only 8 days and being new to the place, I would suggest staying in England if I were you. You could spend 8 years there and still not scratch the surface on things to see and do. Save Ireland and Scotland for another trip. It's a great excuse to return to that area of the world. Enjoy!

Stonehenge is not worth the effort. It's hard to get to and really isn't that much to see compared to what else is on offer in England. There's also nothing else around it worth seeing. You can other stone circles elsewhere in the country that are less touristy and easier to get to.

AirBnB is the best way to stay in London. Hotels are expensive and you can stay at an AirBnb a little further out because the Tube is so efficient and easy to use. Pick something near a tube station since you'll be needing an Oyster card anyway to get around.