London & Harry Potter Studios {England Trip Part 4}

As promised, I'm jumping back in time to cover our first stop in London - the Harry Potter Studio Tour! After a quick shower at the lounge, we left straight from the airport to drive to Leavesden. We had pre-purchased tickets to the tour - and make sure you do. These sell out MONTHS in advance!

The Great Hall was definitely the highlight. They were doing a special costume exhibit while we were there as well, so more costumes than normal were on display. We also loved the backlot sets. If you are at all interested in the screenplay, model creation or filming aspects of movies, I feel like this would be spectacular! They had the model they used for filming Hogwarts on display and it was amazing the amount of detail it had.

We loved walking around the sets and props, as well as drinking some delicious butterbeer. While it was SO fun to do this, I have to say, we both preferred the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios. It was just more interactive!

NOW! Back to our journey from Cornwall to London. It was a long drive that we broke up with a stop at a service station. These things are insane. They even had a rockwall inside of this one! We arrived at our hotel, the St. Pancras Renaissance, a little after noon and we greeted with a glass of sparkling wine! 

Quickly dropping off our bags, we walked to our FAVORITE place, Dishoom. We get the same thing every time we come here - vegetable samosas, black daal, chicken ruby, rice and tons of garlic naan. Seriously mouth-watering!

We visited two museums - the Natural History Museum (my favorite part was the gem rooms!) and the V&A Museum. Both were free, so we enjoyed wandering around without necessarily feeling like we HAD to see everything to get our money's worth.

We made it back in time for complimentary snacks and cocktails at the bar inside our hotel - the Booking Office. We grabbed a quick meal of sushi and randomness from the M&S inside St. Pancras Station and went to bed exhausted.

The next morning, we had time to workout in the gym and grab a tiny breakfast since had a Eating Europe Food Tour in the East End booked! If you remember, we actually did another London food tour with them last November in Soho and one in Trastevere, Rome a few years back.

We started at Spitalfields Market and wandered around the Brick Lane and Shoreditch neighborhoods.  We had some amazing bacon sandwiches at St. John's Bread and Wine, bread and butter pudding at the English Restaurant, freaking delicious Bengali curry on Brick Lane, salted caramel tart, beigel bake, etc. Our favorite was the curry stop!

As usual, the tour was amazing! Our tour guide, Priya, was very bubbly and informative. These tours are perfect because you can try tons of things and get smaller portions than you could normally get if you just walked up and ordered. There is also a fair amount of history sprinkled in between the stops too.

After the gigantic meal, we made our way to the Tower of London. I had pre-booked tickets, so we walked right in. We ended up REALLY loving the Tower. We started with a Yeoman warder tour (our guy was the ravenmaster!) and got some of the history. 

We then got to explore the crown jewels, armory, towers, etc. on our own. We absolutely recommend doing this and make sure you plan plenty of time! We were there for almost 4 hours and they had to kick us out when they closed at 5. We grabbed a glimpse of Tower Bridge and then made our way back to our hotel for more snacks and cocktails that evening. 

We had to be up at 2:30am (!!!) to drive to LHR, return our car and catch our flight to Innsbruck at 6:45, so we made it an early evening. Thanks to United's Excursionist Perk, we were still flying business class, so we had access to the Lufthansa Lounge at Heathrow. We grabbed breakfast there and jumped on our flight to Vienna and then to Innsbruck!

Up Next: Our last blog from our trip - Austria (and a bit of Germany)!

London {Camden, Winter Wonderland & Sketch Tea}

Our last day in London began with a quick tube to Baker Street. We got a glimpse of the famous consulting detective's house and then walked across the street to Regents Park. Everyone was out enjoying the beautiful, crisp weather. The football and rugby fields were packed!

We walked along the canal all the way into Camden Market. This was such a fun and eclectic place with tons of food stalls lining the locks. I chose a bulgogi burrito and Jason had a Japanese tonkatsu curry sandwich. We split some halloumi cheese fries as well - YUM! There were so many interesting shops to peak into, amazing street art and the locks themselves were beautiful. We spent a few hours here just walking around!

Being the Sherlock nerd I am, I wanted to get see where 221B is filmed (on North Gower and not Baker Street). Sadly, we couldn't grab a cuppa at Speedy's because it is closed on Sundays, but we still got to see BBC Sherlock's Baker Street!

After a quick tube ride to Piccadilly Circus, we decided to check out the Liberty London department store. It was all decked out for Christmas and super charming, but the prices were a little too rich for our blood. We wandered down the street to a little pub where we had a few drinks to warm up!

I had made us reservations that afternoon for a champagne Christmas Tea at Sketch. This is definitely an instagram-famous place, but it lived up the to hype! I loved the decor in the various themed rooms, the Christmas trees and snow all throughout the lobby and the spaceship inspired bathrooms. The food was delicious and I SO wanted to bring the entire tea-set home with me as well. It's a bit pricey, but definitely worth it!

Our evening ended with a quick glimpse at the Harrod's Christmas lights (we couldn't go in because it was closed!) and a walk around the Christmas Markets in Hyde Park. It was a whole spectacle - German-style biergartens, carnival rides, arts & crafts, and MULLED WINE! We grabbed ourselves some bratwursts and wine and took in the atmosphere. It was fun, but we were exhausted after our whirlwind tour of London, so we called it a night.

The next morning, we had a quick breakfast at our hotel before we had to leave for Heathrow to catch our return flight. We even got lucky and had two seats together in our own row! It was a wonderful Thanksgiving trip and, like I've said, we're in love with London. We have a trip planned already for next Fall, but London is one of those places that I know we'll return to again and again for the rest of our lives.