London: Last Day and Heading Home!

Note: this is mostly cribbed off of the notes Tashia took in her travel journal. If I had to make this into something well-written we all know it would take another 8 years to ever be finished.

Our last full day in London started off early with a walk to our favorite neighborhood breakfast spot Dan & Decarlo (which still seems to be open as of 2026!).

After that we headed to the tube towards the city. Tashia didn't note it in her travelogue, but there was one day that we took the tube at rush hour and it was a rather uncomfortable, though short-lived, look into what it might be like to live here day in and day out, as opposed to our star-eyed tourist view. But we made it to our destination, the Museum of London. Tashia wrote "Bryan's Favorite!" in her notebook entry about the visit, so I must have loved it. I definitely enjoyed all of the small models and recreations of different periods of the city's history. I'm glad I chose it over the British Museum, which, while still on the list for a future visit, is less focused on a narrow, can-only-find-it-here kind of theme.

For lunch we headed to our second Gordon Ramsey Restaurant of the trip, Bread Street Kitchen. We were somewhat confused at first because there's a separate Gordon Ramsey restaurant, Street Pizza, on the first floor. You have to go into this restaurant and take the stairs up a level to get to Bread Street. Following lunch we headed to the roof for a view of St. Paul's Cathedral.

The last part of the day was a surprise I managed to keep from Tashia up to the minute before it started. We took a tube north quite a ways then got off to take a bus transfer. While we were waiting at the bus stop, we saw a bus pass by that had an advertisement for the Harry Potter Studio Tour on it. Tashia said "oh wow that would be fun to do! Maybe next time"... then the bus turned and pulled into the very station where we were standing. Duh, like I wouldn't find at least one Harry Potter activity throughout our trip! I'm not nearly the HP fan that Tashia is, but it was still really neat to see all the actual stage pieces and costumes and get an insight into the behind-the-scenes of movie-making.

We were getting hungry as we got back to Highgate, but it was later in the evening and the food options were rather limited near our flat. We first tried a pub for dinner, but out they had closed off food service, so we wandered until we found a chip shop for kabobs and a corner store for some drinks. We everything it back to the flat to eat (and apparently take pictures), then we packed, showered, and went to sleep for our last night in London.

Part 2: Going Home

We didn't take any notes of our final day of our trip — probably a combination of being too sad about our trip ending and, more likely, too tired from the travel and jet lag to handle it after the trip — so I'll have to forensically recreate our last day from my memory (ha!), the pictures we took, and my over-preparing.

We headed out early to hit the tube (my notes say we needed to hit the 4:39 or 4:54am departure) and made it to Heathrow with little fuss and enough time for breakfast at Wondertree ($26.55 according to the receipts, which seems outright reasonable for an airport breakfast in a major European city! And it waste tasty, to boot.) I'm pretty sure I snoozed off and on through the flight, except for second breakfast, of course.

We landed in Toronto for a long layover. We bought "long layover" tickets on the train into downtown (clearly our itinerary was not that uncommon) and made a bee-line for the one thing I knew I wanted on my first time in Canada: POUTINE!

I didn't have any specific plans for the rest of our time, so we wandered by the river and took in the sights. Or at least, as much as we could see through the intense fog that day. We decided to spring for a walk through the Toronto Railway Museum then, even though we still had a few more hours left on our layover, we headed back to the airport and took fairly long naps at our gate.

Even though we didn't end up doing that much in the city, the long-layover-mini-vacation idea is definitely a keeper. I had a 20-hour layover in London on my way back from D&D In a Castle in 2023, and earlier this year we flew through Heathrow for our 10th anniversary trip (also to D&D in a Castle), which allowed us to spend a few hours in Windsor. We enjoyed our Windsor excursion because it's the type of place that will always be on our London checklist, but is inconvenient enough to get to from the city center that we may well never have made it there on a full trip. My solo layover is easily one of the top trips I've ever taken. The length (or lack thereof) forced me to take the type of trip I otherwise would not have taken, and the limited timeframe provided enough guardrails that planning for it was still fairly easy. I'm going to try to work long layovers into any vacations I can going forward, where possible.

Our flight landed around 10pm and it was all we could do to make it home and fall into bed. We spent the next day, Sunday, on the couch resting and cuddling a very clingy Carly! Then Monday morning we were back at work. We had to start saving up for the next big adventure!

All-in-all, even all these years later, this was easily my favorite trip I've ever taken. It was long enough to get to do so many things on my bucket list (including things I didn't know were on my bucket list until I started planning the trip), while still leaving plenty of ideas of what to see on future visits. The flat was comfortable and easy to get to, and gave us a small glimpse of what it could be like to live there for real; the people were all wonderful (except the one biker who yelled at us for walking on the bike path that everyone was walking on, but that's probably more a biker thing than a Londoner thing); the food was amazing; and we couldn't have asked for more perfect weather. Even taking the public transport was a breeze and an experience in itself. Best of all for me was all the history, in some cases literally butted up against the modern day. Even after 6 and a half full days (plus one in Paris), I kept finding myself in awe of things that Londoners have been walking by every day for centuries in the same way I drive by a McDonald's.

We don't have any definite plans for when we go back (this year was our next Very Big Trip, so it'll probably be a while before the next one), other than that we know for sure we want to go back, and we want to bring Lucy with us. It will definitely be a different kind of trip!

Until next time...