We decided to go for a long, 3-day weekend in London a while back. The official reason was to see the Chinese New Year celebration parade, but in reality, it was just an excuse to go out of town and spend some time away from the usual weekly routine.

We booked the Park Plaza Park Royal Hotel which we have stayed in before. It is a great 4-star hotel, definitely better than your usual Premier Inns and Travel Lodges, and it is right next to the Park Royal station on the Piccadilly Subway line which can take you smack bang in the middle of London, walking distance away from most everything you would want to see.

We headed for London on Saturday early in the morning around 8:30 and it was a fairly uneventful drive down the M4 with only one stop at the Reading services for breakfast and baby change.
We arrived around 10:30, parked at the parking next to the hotel and headed straight for the subway. The parking is RingGo-operated parking and the 24-hour price is £18 which is a bit steep but is still fine all things considered. There is no discount for hotel guests. As we were staying there for two nights I had to extend the parking for another 24 hours and I found it a bit tricky to do from the RingGo mobile App. If you try to pay for another 24 hours it will refuse as it will say that it is over the maximum allowed stay. The only way to do it that I found was to extend the existing session. I guess you would probably not have that problem if you used the parking machines onsite, but I have not tried it myself.
The Chinese New Year parade was on Sunday morning so for Saturday afternoon we decided to book a visit to the Science Museum. It is free and it has plenty of things to see and do once there.
We hopped onto the subway train and headed for the centre. We just had to pick up a surprise bag we booked from Too Good To Go.
Yes, the missus is a huge fan of the Too Good To Go app and I have to admit that sometimes it could save you quite a bit of money, and it reduces food waste as well. What it is is a platform where various cafes, bakeries, restaurants, food stores, etc. can advertise any leftover food or produce that is near its expiration date at a discounted rate for people to buy and come pick up usually near the establishment’s closing time. That way the place that offers the food can still make some money out of it as opposed to having to throw it away, and you can get sometimes some really nice things at around 50% of the normal price. So, we use it quite a bit.
We went to pick up our surprise bag from the sushi counter at the Mark and Spenser store next to the High Street Kensington subway station and headed for the Science Museum.

The Science Museum is a fascinating place, but it really depends on who you are going there with. We were all there and with a one-and-a-half-year-old baby, it is really not possible to go everywhere, browse around, read all the signs and generally explore. With a little toddler, the most we could stay there was around 3 hours and that was with some time spent in the cafe and having a snack. If you are thinking of going there with children, I would say it is probably best if the children are at least Reception age or older. Otherwise, they, and you, will likely not get the full benefit of the place. Teenagers are also a bit tricky as they are generally uninterested in anything and everything that has to do with going somewhere with their parents and not having access to phones or computers. 🙂
Personally, if I were alone, I could easily spend the whole day there from the time they open until it closes. I would just go everywhere and read everything. Most of it was really intriguing, but alas.

After the 3 hours spent in the Science Museum, we went out and headed across Hyde Park to pick up another two surprise bags from Too Good To Go to hopefully have something for dinner and potentially for the next day’s breakfast. We spent some time in the park while waiting for our time slot to pick up the surprise bags, then had some tea and sundaes near Paddington station.
Two peppermint teas and a sundae for £14 that is it. Just before Covid or even a bit after it, this would have cost less than £10, but there you go and here we are… It also seems to be the norm nowadays to automatically add a 12.5% service charge to everything. The maximum used to be 10% not that long ago. I guess that is the World we now live in and we should all get used to it.
We picked up everything and headed for the nearest Central Line subway station to get back to the hotel.
We checked in, had some food in the room and that was our first day done.

On Sunday morning we had a quick snack in the room and headed straight for the subway and down to Leicester Square station to watch the Chinese New Year’s parade. This was the second year in a row that we watched the parade and watching it on Charing Cross Road near Leicester Square station seems to be the better if not the best place to watch it.
The parade itself has a few floats, some people carrying big dragons, people in traditional costumes from various parts of China dancing and a lot of drums. The whole procession takes about 30 minutes or so to go through. It is definitely something worth seeing although, I doubt I would go for a third time after having seen it twice.

He had a very nice Korean food lunch from a small shop called Bunsik, right next to where we came out of the subway station. They are famous for their Korean corn dog, but we actually got a meal called Corndog Tteokbokki. Yeah… It was spicy and very delicious. Not sure about being healthy though. 🙂

After we finished with our lunch we headed for the Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens. This place is amazing if you are with children aged anywhere between one and a half and twelve or so years old. It is a large fenced area with several different sub-areas themed differently. There are a few sand areas, a huge wooden ship, a few playgrounds with numerous contraptions, and a few nature areas, it has it all. It is not only fenced, but it has controlled access, which means no dogs and no adults without children are allowed in. It feels really safe. It also has a nice cafe and toilet facilities. We spent there around two hours but if my younger son was a bit older than his one and a half and it wasn’t time for his afternoon nap, we could have probably spent the rest of the day there.

Instead, we decided to head for a walk through Kensington Gardens and Diana Memorial Garden and let my son have his nap in the buggy. It also worked out well with the timing as we had to pick up another surprise bag that we booked through the Too Good To Go app from the Kensington Palace caffe. We picked it up just as he was waking up and headed through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park again towards the Science Museum.
Yes, we decided to spend the last couple of hours of the day going to the Science Museum again and enjoying some of its parts that we missed the previous day. If you remember, we had a one-and-a-half-year-old in tow with us and that made it nearly impossible to stay more than a couple of hours in one place, which is nowhere near enough time to see even half of the exhibits in the Science Museum. Once there, we first sat at the cafe to have our snack from the surprise bag and a couple of hot soups. Then, I managed to quickly walk around the places that I missed the previous day and the missus with the boys went to the underground floor where there is a very decent play area for the youngest children with some sensory items and also a water play area inside. It is very rare to see my younger son stay in one place for a solid hour, but I guess the water play area was captivating enough for him. He obviously needed a complete change of clothing afterwards.

That was the end of our visits to the Science Museum during our stay in London. I promise we did not go there on the third day. 🙂

We were planning on going to Richmond Park on the third day. There is a National Trust place called Ham House and Garden near it which we were thinking of visiting but we read in the morning that the house was closed for renovations so we would not have been able to get in. We did want to go to a place where we could get in somewhere as the weather forecast for the day was not looking too great. We decided to look for a place that was roughly along or close to our route home to Bristol and after a bit of browsing the maps, we headed off for Greys Court near Henley on Thames.
It turned out to be on the small side but had everything we wanted. It had the usual National Trust cafe and shop, it had an old house we could get into and it had a nice walled garden. All things we are interested in checking out.
After a quick snack and some coffee at the cafe, we went around the walled garden, which was really nice by the way, even in the winter and then went to see the house. As usual, the National Trust staff were friendly and knowledgeable about the history of the house and all the items in it which made us feel very welcome. In total, we stayed at Greys Court maybe around 2 or 3 hours before heading home.
The drive back was mostly uneventful. We got to Bristol in the late afternoon with plenty of time to get all the luggage and ourselves sorted and ready for work and school the next day.

It was refreshing spending three days away in London. We all definitely needed that. It is getting a bit better with Viktor as well. Even though he is still only one and a half years old and cannot stay in one place, like a museum, for much more than a couple of hours, at least it is getting easier. We do not have to carry him all the time and he is starting to understand what we are saying. Doing it is a matter for a completely separate post though. 🙂
I think we will be doing similar trips again in the future, probably at least a couple of times a year. The next time, however, it should probably be when it is much warmer than this time.
Until the next time.