Looking down and around !!

A trip to London to meet up with A and the children. A second attempt to visit the Sky Garden, the first was cancelled when we had the very hot weather causing travel chaos a few weeks back.

Progress skywards was slow as one of the two lifts was out of order, so a very long queue formed , even though it is organised by a timed booking system.

The views were amazing, but the gardens bit of it, were not as I expected having seen on a program on TV. I thought that we were planning to eat there, but A suggested that we ate later. The children never eat everything on their plates, except for cake, and she said that it was too expensive to be leaving food!!!

Later we walked over to London Bridge Station and got the overground train to Forest Hill to visit the Horniman Museum and Gardens. A place that I had never heard of before, but well worth the visit.

The butterfly house was amazing. I’ve seen so few in our garden at home this summer, but I certainly made up for it in the 20 minutes or so that we spent looking round and taking pictures on my phone.

It was so hot inside.....but we appreciated the cool when we got out.

Then on to the aquarium, the Lego exhibition, the Natural History and World Galleries. All of these spaces were not too big and managed to keep the attention and meet the individual needs of the children. We had eaten when we got there so had limited time for our visit, it seemed so soon that we were heading back to our respective train stations.

I managed to grab a coffee to go before the train departed. I was exhausted and wondered how I was going to stay awake on the journey home.

A young mum with an adorable 2year old sat across the table from me. They had travelled from Riga, via Oslo today and were minus his pushchair (lost in transit somewhere!!!). He was so tired, but so well behaved and a charmer. He wanted to share his supper, his toys and a conversation!! The latter was limited as I don’t speak his language, but he was ahead of me as he could say ‘plane, taxi, phone, thank you and bye-bye. He was a poppet to play with and we had great fun improvising.

I had a phone call as we got close to home in the car to say the a hedgehog had done a ‘sit down’ in the middle of road outside our house and the caller wanted to know how to move it!! It eventually scurried away and I found it sitting in our garden with the feeding bowl upside down on it’s head!!!!

Certainly an interesting and eventful day. The weather has been warm and dry in London, but the rain gods have been working at home to deliver a well needed downpour for the garden.