London: Friday 5 August

It was rather a wasted day today, not only because I was full of a cold - I actually managed to pull myself together to a certain extent (thanks to the Otrivine last night and the blast of air from my CPAP machine, I had a reasonable night and woke up around 7:39am). I thought I'd be staying in bed for the day, but David suggested using our free Golden Tours hop on hop off bus option (through our London Pass). This turned out to be both a blessing and a disappointment. At least today I did very little walking, or multiple flights of stairs. We sat on the bus, or waited for a bus...

We obtained our tickets just along the road, and got straight on their blue line tour, and quickly found ourselves at the Churchill War Rooms and Museum for a couple of hours. So far so good! What a fascinating place - the War Rooms were very interesting (to think the British and Allies' war effort was run from these rooms). And the museum was excellent too! We learnt a lot about Winston Churchill, his childhood (his parents thought he would amount to nothing and ignored him), the difficulties he initially had with just speaking and then public speaking, and eventually his attention to detail which won many admirers as well as causing some frustration for others.

We had lunch at the cafe there (a GF frittata and salad for me, quite nice), and then we headed out around 2pm hoping to continue our circuit on the bus.... ... From about 2pm we waited 20 minutes and finally got on a red tour bus. Luckily, overhearing someone else, I realised that not all the red buses took us back to where we started - they had two circuits, and the one we were on did not return us to where we wanted to go - near our hotel and at The Royal Mews. So, we knew we'd need to change buses soon... ... Well, the next hour was spent on the bus, mainly stuck in traffic and it had no functioning commentary through our headphones. Eventually the driver offered to stop and have all of us wait to get put on a replacement bus because of this, or to carry on to the Tower of London with no commentary - the latter being the popular option amongst passengers. Eventually we arrived, and I enquired with a Golden Tours rep as to the timing of their next blue bus - 10-15 minutes later, we were told. Well, 50 minutes later we were STILL waiting, along with an English family with a wheelchair. Never again!! Apparently they are meant to come every 30 minutes, but not in that traffic, which was apparently unprecedented (Murray and Lorraine had struck it too), but we couldn't help but notice that there was a constant stream of the two other companies (Big Bus and Original) at a rate of around 10 to 1 as a comparison.

An hour later, we were deposited in front of our hotel, and we were far too late to get into The Royal Mews as we'd originally hoped. We'd have to look at doing it tomorrow (it's not open on a Sunday, and that's also the day we move out to a hotel near Heathrow).

We had a drink (I'm enjoying the White Russians) and dinner. I was glad to have had a 'quiet' day, and to have learnt more about Churchill - I had originally intended staying in our room all day! Nevertheless, I was tucked up in bed at 7pm, and was sound asleep just after 8pm!