Exploring London Part 1 + YouTube Video

Watch the Exploring London Part 1 YouTube video at the bottom of the post.

As you know, we recently went on the vacation of our dreams to Europe! It was truly a dream come true to be able to visit all of the places we did and travel with my best friend. We went on a Norwegian Cruise (cruise video coming soon), but first we stopped in London for 2 days to explore and see what the city has to offer. Boy oh boy, we were not disappointed!

We flew from Dallas to Chicago then Chicago to London. We had all the best intentions of sleeping through the entire 8 hour flight to London, and even took Tylenol PM, but did not sleep even one hour. I guess we were too excited. We landed at 6am London time, which was midnight Dallas time, and knew that we had to stay awake until night time to beat the jet lag and adjust quickly for our entire 2 week trip, so we hit the ground running.

As soon as we arrived, we checked in to our hotel The Georgian House Hotel  to freshen up after a 12 hour travel day. The hotel is adorable! It’s a bed and breakfast and it’s so charming and so very London. Our room was tiny tiny but so cute. We quickly found out that our room had no air conditioning and being from scorching Texas, we panicked for a second and then realized we were in Europe and ac is not common. I specifically chose this hotel, well 1. because it was cute, but 2. for the perfect location to all the things we had on our list. Although the hotel was a little expensive, I 100% recommend this hotel for the food, comfort and location. We had breakfast at our hotel, which was a wonderful spread of bread, cheeses, meats, fruit, coffee, juices and more. Once we fueled up, we were ready to explore. We were so lucky to have the best weather while were in London! The coldest it got was in the high 50’s and warmest was 65.

First stop was Buckingham Palace! I think this was what I was most looking forward to see in London. Well to be honest, out all the 7 cities we were traveling to, London was the one I was the most excited about. The Palace is incredible. So much more beautiful and grand than I imagined. It just blows my mind that we are in the 21st century and we still have real life Kings and Queens that live in palaces. Buckingham Palace is located on 39 acres right in the middle of the city and it’s where Queen Elizabeth II lives. It is estimated to be worth 5 billion dollars!

Since this was our first time in London and we were not familiar with the city, we took the Hop-on hop-off Big Bus Tour. This worked out so great and I definetly recommend it if you are in London for a short period of time because it takes you around the entire city. You also get headphones to listen to a brief history lesson of all the things you are passing by. We loved it because it gave us a glimpse of the history of the city and how much of it there is in every corner.

We also went to Kensington Palace which is where William and Kate, and Harry and Megan currently live! This is also where Prince Charles and Princess Diana lived. Kensington Palace is known for their beautiful gardens and Diana’s Fashion Story Exhibition, which we got to tour. We also went in to the Queen and Kings apartments which is basically entire wings of the palace where they used to live in the 17th century. We also toured where Queen Victoria used to live until she was 18 years old before she became Queen and moved to Buckingham palace. She was actually the first monarch to occupy Buckingham Palace right after it was built. Raymond and I had just watched the movie The Young Victoria with Emily Blunt on Netflix a week prior to going to Kensington Palace so I was very happy to actually see it.

Later in the day we went on the London Eye as our last attraction of the day and the view was amazing. It was perfect to see the city we had explored all day from up high. We more or less had gotten familiarized with our surroundings and were able to point out Big Ben, the River Thames, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Tower of London and more. This was a must on my list to do and it was so worth it. Although, Raymond is scared of heights he was too busy looking at the city and didn’t really pay attention to how high were. This is a must in my book if you are visiting London for the first time.

After the London Eye, we went to our hotel to get ready for dinner. I had been looking forward to eating at a restaurant in the Mayfair area called Sketch. The interiors are pink and so corky. I loved it so so so much that it needs it’s own youtube video and blog post. This will be on Exploring London Part 2 very soon.

Well we ended up staying awake for 36 hours and it was pretty brutal. As soon as our head hit the pillow around 10:30pm we were out. We woke up early the next day feeling rested and happy to have caught up with our local time. We had a nice breakfast at our hotel and then checked out and headed to Southampton (about a 2 hour train ride from London), to broad our cruise.

I am already dreaming of the going to London again and doing some of the things we simply did not have the time to do. Big Ben was being remodeled so we didn’t really get to see that, I would love to go inside Buckingham Palace, go to The Tower of London and see the Crown Jewels, and visit more gardens. If you follow me on Instagram you know that I have been obsessed with the Netflix show The Crown. It was just so cool to see the palaces and be in a city with so much history. Needless to say, we loved London!

Thank you so much for following along my Instagram stories while we were on vacation. If you missed any, I have saved them all to my highlights so that I can keep them longer. You can go back and see them any time. Thank you for reading my blog post today and don’t forget to watch and subscribe to my YouTube channel.