2025 London and TA Day 6: Victoria & Albert Museum

We both slept poorly overnight and didn’t get up until 930A. Feeling sluggish, we both settled for cereal for breakfast. Most importantly, however, we decided to simplify our day and punted on revisiting The Design Museum and limiting ourselves to just The Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. This turned out to be a great decision as the V&A was this trip’s “surprise attraction”. We ended up spending about 4 hours at the museum and would have gladly stayed longer if we’d had the energy. There were just so many wonderful exhibits.

Hanging in a central location is a Chihuly glass chandelier. I’m guessing it was about 25’-30’ high. The minotaur fight was a sculpture that was about 2’ high.

In the Hall of Casts were many life-size castings of famous works from around the world, most of them adding to the museum in the 19th century. What was most surprising was the size of the David statue. Neither of us had any idea that the original was so large. I personally thought that it was human-sized. There was also a cast of Trajan's Column.

Miscellaneous casts:

Achilles being dipped into the River Styx, and La Gorgone:

While there we grabbed lunch at their garden café (we shared a nice ham sandwich, crisps, and grapes) while watching children play in the wading pond.

We finally left around 330P. On a very crowded train back we discovered that we’re old: both of us were offered seats by a pair of 20-something girls!

Dinner was at Port House, a tapas place on The Strand. It was really good, especially the Arroz Portugese and the giant Gin and Tonic (which I did NOT share)> :-)

After sampling several dishes we ended the night by with a final trip to Amorino and then packed our bags in prep for tomorrow’s trip to Southampton and the start of our trans-Atlantic cruise!

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2025 London and TA Day 5: British Museum and London Museum Docklands

Today’s Weather



We slept in a bit, not getting up until around 9A. Disappointed that we didn’t get a chance to sample the “Clermont Breakfast Yorkshire Pudding” at breakfast, but still enjoyed a nice start to the day.

Our morning activity was the iconic British Museum.



I had, of course, done some research pre-trip and had a plan that would take us to 10-12 “must see” artifacts, but for some reason I couldn’t pull up the information when needed and, as such, we were a bit directionless during our visit. The place is HUGE, and so much of it seems like the typical “display case full of pots and arrowheads” that I tend to find boring. Fortunately, as a result of listening to scores of episodes of The British History Podcast, we were aware of the treasures found at Sutton Hoo and found the gallery where they were located. That was interesting. However, our overall stay was just under two hours, with us leaving at 1140A. While walking to Underground station we looked for lunch options but, finding none, we made our way over to Canary Wharf hoping to find something before touring the London Museum Docklands.

The walk to the museum is right along a canal, teeming with rental boats.



Although the day was a bit gray it was “summer weather” to many and we saw several rentals out. There were mundane boats, but also things like the Spa Boat, the BBQ Boat, and a rubber duck boat.

The restaurant options around the museum were all much too fancy (and too much food) for our tastes, so we opted to simply get something at the museum’s snack bar. The options there turned out to be extremely limited, however, so we ended up sharing a (very disappointing) tomato and cheese croissant and a bag of crisps. It wasn’t filling, but it took the edge off.

The museum itself was pretty interesting, but after 2 hours our feet were sore and our brains starting to turn to mush, so we did a speed run through the last few galleries before heading back to the hotel, stopping off at a Sainsbury Local by the hotel to pickup some Oreo Gingerbread biscuits and drinks to enjoy in our room as we relaxed before dinner.

Dinner was at Flat Iron (Southbank), a popular chain that offers a limited menu (one specific type of steak) and extremely reasonable prices. Although there was one closer to the hotel, we were unable to get a reservation there and therefore ended up walking across the river on the Golden Jubilee Bridge to the store at The Royal Festival Hall.






Upon entry, you’re given popcorn while you peruse the menu. We both had the Flat Iron Steak, a green salad, and Homemade Beef Dripping Chips – plus a 375ml bottle of wine, each. I got a peppercorn sauce on the side, but it did not improve things so I left it alone. The food wasn’t the world’s greatest, but we enjoyed the meal. With the bill they gave us two little cleavers (sized as if for a charm bracelet) that could be exchanged for a mini ice cream cone, but we pocketed those and instead stopped at Amorino on our way to returning to the hotel.

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2025 London and TA Day 4: The Museum of the Home and West End Theater

We’d previously been to the Geffrye Museum (now renamed The Museum of the Home) with the boys in 2014 and found it fascinating. This time, however, E and I planned to make use of the audio guide for ADULTS rather than the family guide we’d used with the boys. Further, I hoped we could also take the guided tour of Almshouse 14. Not sure if that had been an option back in 2014 or not but it sounded interesting.

As it happens, the museum has made some changes since we last were there. Sadly, the guided audio is no longer offered. Additionally, some of the older sitting rooms have been removed, with many of the artifacts being repurposed for standard display case style exhibits. They’ve also revised some of the sitting rooms and really leaned into social issues further. For example, what used to be the 1960’s sitting room was now revised to reflect (IIRC) Caribbean culture, while others focused on a lesbian setting, an Indian setting, and a futuristic setting. While still interesting, it was not the experience we’d hoped to have and we were somewhat disappointed by our followup visit. We also missed the Almshouse 14 tour by about 10 minutes!

I’d also intended to make Dennis Sever’s House our afternoon destination, having gone so far as to contact them earlier in the year to confirm that they were going to be open during the time of our visit. While the house was open, it was only open on weekends during our time in London so we couldn’t follow through with our plan to visit. I had a backup plan (of course!) to visit Victoria Embankment Garden if we hadn’t already done so on the 1st day in town, or potentially check out the shops at Covent Garden. Instead, we opted for the relaxation route and, after first stopping at a Pret on Villiers Street and buying a sandwich and chips (crisps) to share, we took our snacks back to the room and enjoyed them while relaxing on our couch. After that, I napped HARD for 40 minutes.

Post-nap, we wandered back to Villiers Street to investigate the cheesy souvenir shops to see if we could find anything for the kids and/or a Christmas ornament, but we came up empty-handed. Also tried to find a geocache on Lower Water Street, but based on recent DNFs it looked like the cache had gone missing about 10 days ago. I noted that the pipe that was the probable GZ seemed to have new water sealant around it, so my theory is that the city had just recently repaired something and removed the cache at the same time.

On the way back to the room in order to get ready for dinner and our theater tickets we stopped to look at the Eleanor Cross outside Charing Cross Station.

Finally, we set out for dinner at Prezzo (London St Martin’s Lane). For a chain restaurant it was pretty good. I had The Spicy One pizza while E tried the Spaghetti Carbonara. We both had side salads. After dinner we walked just past the theater to a gelato place (la Gelatiera in Covent Garden) for dessert – it was OK, but not close to the quality of Amorino!

In April 2025 I looked online for all the shows, music, and comedy events that might be possible while in London. I’d already ruled out 2:30P matinees performances, but after some thought I decided that a 7:30P show wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, especially since so many theaters were less than 10 minutes walking distance from The Clermont. From among all the possibilities we selected “The Comedy About Spies” at the Noel Coward Theatre. This show was presented by Mischief Theatre, the same folks who produced “The Show That Goes Wrong” and similar fare.

The show was hysterical. They maintained the farcical pace from start to finish, and the show was VERY physically demanding on the cast. We saw all the prime cast except for Nancy Zamit, who apparently had the night off. Our seats were in the 2nd row of the Dress Circle and were excellent. We had an fantastic time and the 2:30 minute show (including intermission) passed by in a flash. We made the quick walk back to the hotel in reasonably quiet streets and arrived back in our room by 1010P.

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2025 London and TA Day 3: The Postal and London Transport Museums

Today’s Weather and Internet

 


We started the day around 730A, following a really good night’s sleep. We went down to breakfast about 8A, held on the 1st floor in an older style parlour. The buffet was excellent, and similar to that of the Grand Hotel Stockholm. There was a selection of hot food for creating your own Full English, with the main entrée changing daily. I only recall the 2nd day’s main, which was the Clermont Breakfast Yorkshire Pudding (which was awaiting restock when I dished up, so never had it). Additionally, there was a bagel/smoked salmon/cheese station, a pastry station, a cereal station, and a fresh-baked bread station. The morning buffet was setup in the bar beside the dining area.

First visit of the day was to The Postal Museum via a 25 minute bus ride. We started with a ride on the Mail Train underneath the post office, which was very well done. As the train moved through portions of the tunnels you’d stop occasionally and projections would play on the curved walls to illustrate some aspect of the history of the railway system.

The train cars themselves were a bit cramped. E and I shared the two seats of a car, with me wedged into the rear-facing seat diagonally. While my left leg could be on the ground, my right leg rested over E’s legs onto her forward-facing seat.

The train ride was followed by a meander through their so-so museum, after which we took a bus back to the area of the London Transport Museum where we had a 130P timed entry. As it was just prior to noon and light rain was falling, we decided to have lunch at a nearby Pret and lazed at our table until it was time to walk over to the museum, first making a quick reconnoiter of Covent Garden, filled with smells from the fried food booths (I think).

The Transport Museum was really interesting. Despite our growing fatigue as the day progressed, we still spent about 2.5 hours there before walking back to the hotel. We intended to head to our room for a nap, but housekeeping would consistently not get to our room until late afternoon, as we discovered on this first day as they knocked on the door just as we were about to settle in. Instead, we went down to the hotel’s bar and enjoyed a drink before returning in time for a quick nap before our dinner at Palm Court Brassiere, which was back in Covent Garden. We shared some pre-entrée sourdough bread – with butter for E and black olive tapenade for E. For dinner I had the Whole Tiger Prawns (nice but not spectacular) while E had the Half Chicken, which she enjoyed.

We skipped Palm Court’s dessert choices and instead went to the gelato place we’d seen by the hotel on Villiers street – and it was EXCELLENT. I had their dark chocolate (which I believe was the “Amorino Chocolate”, although this may be the standard chocolate I got the 2nd time we went) while E sampled their Cherry. We were both impressed! From there, it was back to the hotel so we could watch some TV, read, and then get to sleep.

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2025 London and TA Day 1 and 2: SFO to LHR

Flying on Virgin Atlantic

Location at Start of Day….Home. D’uh!

In revising the London portion, when we decided to combine the TA cruise with the London trip I dropped several days of activities, including removal of all locations that weren’t directly in London itself. So, no more Eltham Palace (which, upon further investigation, I discovered to be a 1930s Art Deco building built around a medieval Great Hall, so not worth the trip), no HP Studio Tour revisit, etc. What was left was primarily museums.

We're on our way!

One question that cropped up around July 2024 and took some time to resolve related to some announced changes to entry requirements to the UK for non-citizens. The date at which those new requirements would be implemented was not clear, and therefore I had to keep checking back to see if we’d have to file additional paperwork to obtain the necessary clearances. It was clear that the days of flying with just a US passport are coming to an end, and pre-entry authorizations that are less rigorous than a full visa would be coming. In September 2024 things started to clear up as it was announced that, effective 8 Jan 2025, Americans would need to have an ETA (electronic travel authorization) in order to fly to the UK. Applications would open 27 November 2024 at the UK Application Portal. Pricing was announced at GBP 10 per person for an authorization that would last 2 years and could be used for multiple entries during that period. 

Upon learning this, I set a calendar reminder to look at obtaining our ETAs in July 2025, about 2 months prior to our planned flight. However, even that became muddy as in October 2024 there were some noises online that those dates were slipping later and later. Again, had to go back into wait-and-see mode.  At the end of December 2024, I once again reviewed the status of ETAs and reconfirmed that we’d need to apply for one. I also realized that we MIGHT need an ETIAS, also, given that the cruise would stop at Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland, which were slated to require the appropriate pre-authorization starting in May 2025 (following years of delays). I decided not to spend time trying to understand whether going ashore and returning to the ship would demand pre-existence of an ETIAS – I figured that, if they accepted applications, we’d simply get them. So added to my July 2025 reminder to also apply for an ETIAS, too. In early 2025 it was announced that ETIAS implementation was delayed until at least 2026, so didn’t have to do this one.

I executed on the ETA application on April 3, 2025 – once again a bit spooked by the newly installed tariffs and uncertainty if there might be any retaliation by the UK for US-based applicants. Using their Android app it took about 5 minutes to take photos, scan the chip in our passports (I didn’t know we could do this!), and pay the USD $13.45 per person. Within one minute of submitting our requests we had our emailed approvals and were ready to go!

The original expectation was that we’d take the same Virgin Atlantic (VS) SFO-LHR flight we’ve taken on prior trips to the UK. On our last trip we splurged on Premium Economy and those wider seats made a HUGE difference in our trip. We were so much more comfortable on the flight over and not nearly as tired as we’d been previously.

Sadly, when I looked at the details for VS20, it turned out that Virgin had changed to their newer A350-1000 plane on that route instead of the older (but better/wider PE seating) B787-900. During summer season, however, Virgin adds a 2nd flight (VS42 from SFO) that still uses the B787-900 – or, at least, this was true as of December 2024. VS20 was a 500P->1100A flight, whereas VS42 was scheduled for 1030P to 435P. The more we thought about the later arrival the more we liked the idea. We figured we’d pull into London around 630P or so – and probably very tired, on the assumption that we’d sleep little on the overnight flight. Combine that with our appetites probably being a bit “off”, the idea of dropping stuff at the hotel and simply walking to a local light meal (like fish and chips or even, god forbid, Five Guys) and then going to bed didn’t sound too bad!

I started tracking both pricing and seat availability in November 2024. At that time two of the PE seats were already booked and the one-way prices for PE were running around $1200pp. Looking at flights heading out in March 2025 for comparison purposes showed those selling at about $900pp – so I figured if/when I could snag flights around 1K each I’d grab them (unless I needed to move sooner simply to ensure we got the seats we wanted). Unfortunately, the 2-3-2 seat arrangement meant that only 12 of the 20 PE seats on the sides could be booked by me (the two front rows required either higher status than we have or cost an additional $78), and two of those were already sold when I started tracking. By mid-November another 4 were gone, so I pulled the trigger right away as I didn’t want a repeat of our last trip, where I had to work very hard to find a flight with available PE seats. So, on 11/17/2024 I booked the last row of PE as several posters on seatguru.com had specifically commented that the last row could stay fully reclined w/o impeding anything – and one reviewer specifically said that the proximity to Economy didn’t result in any significant increase in noise. Later, I came across a few videos, including someone who sat in our exact seats (25A and 25C) and could therefore see visual evidence of what the written reviews said. I did, at one point, toy with the idea of splurging on Upper Class (figuring “hey we should try this ONCE in our lives”), but the more I researched the less impressive it sounded. Lots of complaints on SeatGuru that Virgin’s angled seats made your neck hurt in order to look out the window, the seats lacked places to stash drinks, glasses, etc., and the “lay flat” seats were VERY uncomfortable compared to other airlines.

For the return from Boston I was excited to see that JetBlue flew BOS-SJC, and that they rated extremely highly on seat comfort, including 18” wide seats as standard. Unfortunately, a deeper look showed that they only fly into SJC “seasonally”, and when I did a test booking for our return date of 9/14/25 I discovered that they had no SJC routes at that time. So I had to keep looking, knowing that the choices were either to fly BOS-SFO (in which case we could do JetBlue and/or other non-stop flights) or BOS-SJC with 1 stop, non-stops being non-existent. Given that JetBlue is about half the price of everyone else I suspect that we’ll end up flying back to SFO (and probably just standard Economy as the reviews of the Extra Room seats were not very impressive).

Like our trip to Alaska in 2014, flight schedules changed in the months leading up to the trip. Our SFO-LHR flight changed as follows:

Original Booking: VS42 Dep 10:15P Arr 4:35P

Revised 24 Dec 2024 VS42 Dep 9:20P Arr 3:50P net positive change!

On December 31, 2024 Virgin filed some route changes that included returning to the B787-900 on VS20 instead of the A350-1000 that had been indicated when I bought the tickets (and had been driven to use flight VS42, instead). While I theoretically could have taken steps to move us back onto VS20 I decided to keep things as-is. I was curious about whether the later departure from SFO (and consequent later arrival at LHR) would be a better fit for us. I recall how, post-VS20 arrival for our last trip, we had about 2-3 “good” hours of energy and had both pretty much crashed by about 6P GMT – right while trying to eat dinner. Perhaps this time we’d still have “good” hours through dinner and then crash at the “right” time around 10P?

RE: Virgin pricing: On April 15, 2025 I noted the first movement of prices. The $1200pp rate had dropped to $855pp. BIIIIIG drop! I immediately looked at our flight to see whether PE seats were still available – but it turned out the cabin was fully booked, so this was a “fake” price since there was no way to take advantage of it. I certainly wasn’t going to risk cancelling our confirmed seats in hopes of being able to rebook them at the lower rate! I did check into the schedule of one-stop flights SFO-LHR to see if perhaps I could find a cheaper (yes) Premium Economy on Virgin that also flew the 787-900 – but, alas, the connections in Seattle flew the A330-900 while LAX flew the A350-1000, and both of those suffer from having only 18.5” wide seats in PE. So while we could have saved about $600 by connecting, this didn’t seem worth the extra 3 hours of total flight time to fly in narrower seats.

While all this research and (fun) time-wasting was going on, cruise check-in arrived 45 days ahead of boarding, at 4P on July 15. I was, of course, online as the clock changed to 4P (i.e. midnight at the port of embarkation) and spent 3 minutes updating the web page before wondering whether my calculations were off. I took a short break. A random refresh at 410P yielded the check-in link, however, and I hurriedly completed data entry, including a couple of selfie photos we’d taken about 30 minutes previously. I was presented with a list of arrival windows and choose the earliest offered (1130A-noon) and that was that. Set Sail passes were dumped to PDF for later inclusion in the Folder of Fun. The entire process took just under 5 minutes once I got started.

On August 1st, Royal issued our Cruise Documents. On that same day I also canceled our Reykjavik bus tour because their rescheduled event made no sense. We were slated to leave at a rescheduled noon for a 6-hour trip – for a port visit that ended at 5P! So they had their heads up their butts. I could have potentially rescheduled for a 9:30A departure, but I had low confidence in Shore Excursions Group at this point. Instead, I figured I’d take our plans of the 1st afternoon and simply move them to the following morning.

As expected, I got an email 24 hours prior to our departure time indicating that we could check-in for our flight. For the first time, I decided to wait until we got to the airport before completing the process. I had looked up our flight record on Virgin’s site and it seemed like they wanted some additional info ahead of time about our passports, and some of the fields were asking about our return flight. Of course, since we’re taking a cruise ship to come back to the US I suspected that there might need to be some discussion at the check-in desk about what our plans were to leave the UK. I just figured it would be easier to let the check-in experts figure things out rather than me trying to guess what fields I could ignore.
According to a quick look at Expert Flyer’s Seat Map, it looked like our flight was about 75% full. Our 35 seat Premium Economy section was filled. Interestingly enough, when I checked again 24 hours later (AFTER check-in had opened) it showed only 5 seats available: 3 Upper Class and 2 Economy. I assume this results from seats locked by the airline being opened up for folks at check-in time. So it would seem that roughly 75% of the passengers pre-selected their seats (from a subset of the options) and the other 25% took what was left at time of check-in.

Based on the schedule of activities we experienced on VS20 during our trip to Scotland in 2023, the anticipated timing of VS42 onboard events was as follows:

Boarding/PE Drinks 820P (PST) / 420A (GMT)

Pushback/Taxi 920P / 520A

Takeoff 945P / 545A

Snack + drink 1025P / 625A

Dinner + 2nd drink 1055P / 655A

3rd drink 1155P / 755A

Lights out 1210A / 810A

Lights on (110 pre-land) 500A / 100P

Breakfast (90 pre-land) 520A / 120P

Landing 750A / 350P

We could generally depart SFO up to 60 minutes late (calculating from the 920P pushback time) and still make it to LHR “on time”.

Something interesting I learned as I was reviewing prior flights of VS42 over a period of a few weeks: flight routing varies a LOT. I always assumed that a flight would basically follow the same path every time, but that’s not the case. In particular, once VS42 leaves the US it is very unpredictable how it will get to LHR. Sometimes it heads north into Canada and passes over some portion of Hudson Bay – but sometimes south of that. Sometimes it passes over a portion of Greenland, but sometimes south of that. Sometimes it makes landfall in northern Scotland and other times it instead passes over Ireland. So it isn’t just a question of which runways it takes off from in SFO and/or lands on at LHR that clearly drive the first and last parts of a flight path – weather and/or winds (I assume) have a huge effect on all the middle parts of the flight, too. I had originally intended to give myself some landmarks to look for during the first 30 minutes of the flight heading out of SFO, but there was too much variability there to get specific. Sometimes the flight would pass north of Woodland, other times south of Davis. By the time the flight hits the Nevada border we could be several hundred miles either side of Tahoe!

One week prior to the flight we were sent a link to allow us to pre-select our dinner meal. The choices were pretty bleak:

• Three Cup Asian Style Braised Chicken with steamed rice, stir fried vegetables
• Roasted Parsley Cod with beurre blanc, creamy mashed potatoes, buttered green beans and carrots
• Seared Spinach Stuffed Gnocchi with shimeji mushroom, pesto cream sauce, and baby tomatoes

While I thought that the cod had the best overall menu, neither one of us was prepared to trust microwaved fish, so we both opted for the chicken. In a surprise move, the next day Virgin emailed out a link to the onboard menu for Premium Economy, so we were able to see both dinner and breakfast offerings ahead of time. The chicken turned out to be pretty poor, unfortunately. However, since we’d recently finished with our stop at Burger King on the way to S&W’s we weren’t left hungry.

Eileen can often sleep for an hour or so on a flight, but in general it is close to impossible for me to sleep. In the ongoing quest to figure out a solution, we both tried new travel pillows this time as none of our prior choices have worked well for her – or at all, for me. This time we’re both trying the Trtl Travel Cool Pillow, which I found for sale on the company’s store at a price much lower than Amazon’s. On the surface the ergonomics made a lot of sense to me. In practice, I liked the pillow. I was still unable to sleep, but for about 2 hours I was able to relax and avoided all the constant tossing and turning that’s usual for me. E didn’t find the pillow to be beneficial to her, however.

Another difference in packing for this trip is an acknowledgement of both our age as well as the length of the trip. For the first time we’re carrying a 3rd toilet kit. This one is stuffed with a lot of OTC medications, “just in case”. We’re aware that we’re at the tail end of our Covid vaccinations and are heading into a lot of large groups in constrained spaces, whether airplane, buses, trains, or ships – and we’re going to be far away from the convenience of drug stores much less medical care. Therefore, we loaded up on cold meds, sleep meds, gut meds, pair relievers, and pretty much anything we could think of. Hopefully we’ll never have need for any of this stuff – but we don’t want to make a bad situation worse by not having as much help available as possible.

And then…finally…after more than two years of planning, it was Sunday August 24, 2025 and time to get this vacation started!

I started the day by looking at the status of our arriving aircraft, then in the process of flying from LHR to SFO as flight VS41. Hoping to find that it was arriving at SFO earlier than its nominal 730P arrival time, as that would suggest that our 920P pushback from the gate was an extremely high probability event. This seemed to be the case – it was tracking to arrive around 701P - but then the ultimate case of irony! 

I had been watching VS41 live for WEEKS. I’d watched dozen of hours of this flight, getting a sense for how things worked. Finally, on the day that VS41’s actual performance REALLY mattered? Well, somewhere over NE Canada FlightRadar24 decided the flight had ended and stopped tracking it in real-time. I could still follow it on FlightAware, but I didn’t have the “feel” of FlightAware, so ended up tracking UA939 (also LHR-SFO) that appeared to be on pace to land just 2 minutes ahead of VS41 and used that as my benchmark. Unbelievable! About 2 hours after disappearing from FlightRadar the flight came back and I was able to see that it was going to arrive at SFO early.

Having packed our bags the night before, we said farewell to the cat and drove to S&W’s house, stopping along the way at Burger King to have a small fast food snack since we didn’t expect to have onboard food until around 11P PDT. We arrived at their house around 615P. We handed over E’s keys (I kept mine), for we had decided to stash our car at their house while we were out of town (leaving space in the garage should our house-sitter want to park her car) and S then drove us to SFO (in our car, so no need to move our luggage), arriving around 645P to a very crowded drop-off area. About 1/3 of the curb space was unavailable due to construction, so gridlock.  We hopped out of the car in the midst of a construction zone and walked underneath scaffolding into the terminal.

Check-in was quick and easy and we were sitting at gate A12 by 720P playing games on our tablets prior to our 835P boarding.

This terminal was very noisy with constant unintelligible announcements echoing off the high ceiling. Boarding actually began about 10 minutes earlier than expected – we were actually in our seats by 835P, sipping Prosecco.

Boarding complete    903P (PDT) / 503A (GMT)

Start taxi                 911P / 511A

Line up &wait at 1R   927P / 527A

Takeoff                    930P / 530A

Snacks                    950P / 550A

Dinner                    1040P / 640A    Water and canned rose for both of us

Clean-up                 1125P / 725A

Coffee service          1130P / 730A

Lights out                1155P / 755A

Bathroom visit         4A/11A          Get apple juice, butter cookies from Wander Wall

Fidgeting                 410A/ 1110A  1~5-20% of pax starting to wakeup/fidget

We’re just approaching the coast of Maine about now, about to cross the Atlantic. Looks like we’re targeting the southern tip of England rather than crossing further north over Ireland.

Lights on                 628A / 128P

Breakfast                648A / 148P

Landing at LHR        813A / 313P

My screen’s USB port was non-functional, but fortunately the AC power outlet underneath my seat went live once we hit 10K feet so I was able to keep my tablet on AC throughout the flight. As promised by the research, our seats in the back row were awesome. We kept reclined the whole way.

Monday, 25 August 2025: Landing in London and Our Hotel

Location at End of Day...London, baby!

One thing I had obsessed about was how to most efficiently get from LHR to our hotel. I was concerned about managing our luggage in the Underground stations. While I knew that the Charing Cross Underground station was our “closest” station, I had confirmed early on that this station is so old that it basically has TONS of stairs rather than escalators – and that concerned me.

I started my research by putting out some questions on CC. A few people suggested that instead of exiting at Charing Cross that we instead continue onward to the Embankment station. However, it still wasn’t clear to me that using Embankment would REALLY solve our concerns. Ultimately, I found a video on YouTube showing a walkthrough of the station. Near the end of the video I was able to specifically see the camera walking the exact path from the platform we’d arrive at all the way up to the street – and it showed that, other than a single 2-step stairway, the entire vertical distance would use escalators. Once at street level we’d have to walk about 4-5 minutes along Villiers Street to the hotel entrance. With that info known we could take the (nice and comfy) Elizabeth Line from LHR to Tottenham Court Road, take a (flat) walk and escalator to transfer over to the Northern Line and, ultimately, end up at Embankment Station.

Although I didn’t use it during the planning stages, I did find this interesting geographically correct version of the London transit map in July 25. And this version based on concentric circles that is surprisingly easy to understand!

FWIW: In April 2025, someone on CC mentioned “axonometric drawings” of the Underground stations in a post. Following up on this I came across an INCREDIBLE resource of 3D drawings of Underground stations that showed stairs, escalators, and so forth. While not 100% to scale, this did confirm what I’d seen in the video, above. In particular, I noted that the video showed a long walk to get to what appears to be Escalator 7 at Embankment, even though the (closer) Escalator 10 also shows that it goes to the ticket hall. However, there’s a longer staircase at the TOP of Escalator 10 compared to the shorter staircase at the BOTTOM of Escalator 7 (which must equate to the 2 steps I saw in the video). So we COULD take the closer Escalator 10 – but there’s a risk that the staircase at the top of that escalator might be 4-5 steps – and perhaps more. Of course, it could also be just 2 steps!

And speaking of steps….(oh, what a segue).

Like so many others, I was curious as to which route planning app would be best to use: Google Maps, Citymapper, or TfL GO. Some online research made it clear that there was a pretty even split between Google Maps and Citymapper – with TfL being considered an also-ran. I decided that I needed to form my own opinions, so I did my own testing, using a fictional trip from The Museum of the Home to The Clermont Hotel, starting at 4P on a random Thursday “in the future”. I was counting clicks and noting how many steps certain processes took, what information was presented (and when, and how effectively), and also did a bunch of screen-capping and jotted down my notes, but my ultimate takeaway was as follows.

I liked the user experience of working with Citymapper for almost everything…but the ONE THING they do sub-optimally is something that is pretty important to me. Citymapper buries info about how much walking a route choice includes until one step later in the route selection process than Google Maps does:



Google, on the right, shows that the first route that I could choose involves 10 minutes of walking at the end. At the same point in the selection process, Citymapper, on the left, hasn’t yet exposed that info. Citymapper won’t show you the 10-minute walk until the NEXT screen.

I like EVERYTHING ELSE about working with Citymapper compared to Google Maps, so this is quite frustrating! Citymapper is showing me more choices (5 vs 2.5) on the screen, including several that will arrive before the “most suggested” route, and doesn’t clutter the screen with a map showing a path that ultimately doesn’t matter. (I’m selecting based on start and end, not the things in the middle, so the map is not critical info.)

After waffling back and forth, I ultimately decided to use Citymapper and accept the extra clicks.

And, like most of the rest of the internet, I thought TfL GO’s UX and UI was a joke. There wasn’t a single thing they did better than one of the competitors. Further, TfL GO fails to return MANY route choices that are significantly better than those they do decide to offer. Example: Google and CM both offered me the 243 bus at 4:03. TfL offered the 4:19 bus (also ignoring the 4:09 bus, too)! Pathetic.

Staying on the topic of phone use, here’s a sign of change. Last time we went to the UK I added international plans to our Verizon phones, which cost us around $25/line. This time around? $100/line!

I tried something new this trip related to computer gear. On prior trips I’ve gone back and forth between taking only the tablet + keyboard vs also bringing my laptop. The laptop with its large screen is so much more natural for me – but it does add several pounds that weighs down the backpack, plus it is one more device that competes for a network connection onboard.

This time I left the laptop at home but added a Bluetooth mouse to sit alongside the BT keyboard. I also added a USB C to HDMI hub (with a charging port plus a couple of USB ports) that I plugged into my phone. With this combo and Samsung Dex (which I first discovered in April 2025) I could use my phone as a poor-man’s laptop – as long as I can connected to a TV either wirelessly (unlikely when traveling) or via HDMI, which was a decent probability. If I could connect, the TV would act as my large screen monitor, and Dex would offer a more desktop-like experience from my phone including multiple, resizable windows running Android apps. So I’d be able to web browse and use Microsoft Office apps ON THE PHONE but interact with real keyboard and mouse on a large format monitor. If it didn’t work then I would have to move the KB and mouse over to my tablet and use the apps there, displaying on the tablet’s screen. I would have loved to use my tablet for the Samsung Dex use-case, but sadly the budget-friendly Tab A7 Lite doesn’t support Dex.

Once we arrived at LHR we made the trek from the terminal to baggage claim. Our bags were on the carousel within 5 minutes of our arrival in the baggage hall, so we then made our way to the Elizabeth Line, made the change to Northern Line at Tottenham Court Road (accidentally getting on the wrong train and having to make a switch to the correct direction at the Goodge Street station) so we could finally exit at Embankment. The walk up to street level was a simple as the video led us to believe, and in hot 78 degree weather we walked up Villiers Street and were checking into the Clermont by 440P.

The mass of people on Villiers Street was a real surprise to me. During pre-trip research I’d often looked at Google Street View of the area. All the photos there dated from the lockdown period during the pandemic, and as such showed very little life. In normal circumstances, however, the area is absolutely seething with people. Loved it!

On our way to our room up the elevator (they had two, but one of them was unavailable the entire stay as it was being renovated, leading to some long wait times for the elevator to arrive)

We met a couple from Sacramento where the husband had a lot of Larry Byler energy. In our quite comfortable room, chilled Asti Spumante and chocolate cake awaited us.

We opened the Asti and put the cake in the in-room mini-bar (where we never touched it). The mini-bar contents were all free for us, and the water, diet Coke, and milk chocolate bar were something we grabbed daily. I stockpiled the chocolate bars for later eating. We both took a sponge bath to wipe the travel sweat off of us.

Our hotel room (room 533 on the 5th floor) overlooked Charing Cross Rail Station, which itself sits on top of Charing Cross Underground station.

The experiment of using VS42 outbound instead of VS20 turned out to be very successful. Our energy was good post-landing and we were able to power through the rest of the day with minimal fatigue. We even felt good enough at 620P that we walked through Victoria Embankment Gardens. This day was apparently a bank holiday and there were a TON of people out and about on this gorgeous day. Folks walking around, sitting on the lawns, sunning themselves, eating at the open air restaurants. Just so much energy everywhere!

Upon entry to the park you pass the old York Watergate. Prior to construction of the Embankment in 1862 (underneath which new sewage lines took waste far down the Thames rather than simply dumping into the river at this point) the Watergate sat immediately next to the water.

Walked over to the D’Oyly Carte memorial (just outside the back of the Savoy Hotel) and the Arthur Sullivan memorial (ditto),

then returned to Villiers and ate dinner at Hobson’s Fish & Chips. I’d selected this as kind of a “throwaway” meal, figuring that we’d be pretty tired and perhaps feeling a bit logy and not ready to enjoy better food. We were actually both hungrier than expected and ended up each getting an order of fish along with a shared plate of chips, plus a salad for E. Another positive side effect of using VS42 as our flight.  

We took note of Amorino, a gelato store on Villiers that we’d take advantage of on several subsequent nights, but on this first night we went back to the hotel and watched random stuff on Dave TV. At 845P I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, so I took a shower and then lounged in the nice plush hotel robe until we both got into bed around 10P.

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2025 London and 15N Trans-Atlantic Cruise on Brilliance of the Seas: Planning

Sunday, August 24, 2025 through Sunday, September 14, 2025

Introduction

I began documenting this trip back in October 2023, when I started the planning process. For the next two years I researched a TON of information and recorded my findings for historical purposes. Therefore, a lot of this document includes information that represented POTENTIAL activities that didn’t ultimately happen. However, I’ve kept that information here for my own future benefit.

When it comes times to document actual daily activities, I’m trying a different format for the cruise portion of the document. This cruise we found ourselves settling into a pattern of activities that don’t merit repeated narration. As such, I’m going to show the strawman I built for each day’s activities (based upon the pre-published activities published on Royal’s app in the 2 weeks leading up to the cruise) alongside the ACTUAL activities we did in a side-by-side tabular format. The narrative will focus on unique aspects of what we did – but I won’t keep writing things like “we spent <this time> reading at the Schooner”.

Planning for London…

Soooo….it is October 20, 2023 and we’re barely back from our trip to the UK, including Edinburgh, and I’m already thinking about the next one! It’s funny, because as recently as a week ago I was unable to feel any excitement about planning another trip, but now I’m already thinking about possibly planning a London-focused trip for 2025.

Some big take-aways from our trip this year were:

• We don’t want to keep changing locations like we had done;
• I don’t want to drive if I can avoid it;
• We want to dig deeper into wherever we are;
• Guided tours at destinations are a good thing;
• We are more likely to appreciate tours that include transport than we did when younger. Letting someone else handle the transport is both convenient and likely reduces our overall amount of walking.

While collecting attraction information via britainexpress.com for the 2023 trip I had compiled all their info re: London and that list, while extensive, was still obviously just a subset of the options that city had to offer. Even at that, however, there seemed to be enough options to suggest that a London-focused trip could be quite rewarding - not that that was ever really in doubt. So, more research was needed.

I started by comparing the list of London museums listed on Wikipedia with the list I already had and ended up adding several dozen new options. I also started to survey some of the tour aggregator sites to note down any interesting looking options for both London and London day trips. The latter provided some ideas on both pre-packaged options as well as possible DIY day trips.

Next came the step of creating a Google map of London with all the various options shown as pins, to once again get a better idea of the relative geographic location of things to one another. I found that helpful in planning our journey to Edinburgh. I was hoping that at some point doing this for London might inform me about good destinations to group together. I imagined that I’d be noting likely Underground lines and stations for each potential destination so connections like “site A and site B are both on the Circle line so make a good pair to visit on the same day” would be possible to recognize.

The big driver in organizing the trip and what to see came when I decided to try to answer the related questions of “Which underground stations serve the most lines?” and “Which underground lines do most of the things we might want to see lie close to?” The former question led to the conclusion that the Charing Cross and Embankment station pair connected to a lot of lines, as did the Baker Street and Euston Station lines. The latter question was tougher to figure out – but when I focused on the Charing Cross area I did note that this seemed like a VERY good base of operations for a London-focused trip. Most attractions seemed to be right around 30 minutes away, and a few were even within walking distance.

Now, it is likely that I would have reached the same conclusion about most ANY station since all the lines are so interconnected. However, using our experience from 2015 when we stayed in Bayswater, our local station (Marble Arch) served ONLY the Central line, so we did a lot of transferring. Charing Cross, however, serves Bakerloo and Northern, and the nearby Embankment station serves two more lines (Central and District). Between those two stations we could get to a TON of places without transfers to other lines. Further, settling in Charing Cross brought The Clermont Charing Cross to the forefront of places to stay. The hotel sits on top of the Charing Cross railway station, across the street from Charing Cross Underground, and about a 6 minute walk from Embankment Underground – so while pricey the convenience factor was HUGE. The Clermont was also a sop to our age. There’s no way we would have considered a place like this 20 years ago. We would have considered it too expensive and not appropriate to our youthful spirit. At age 60+, it seemed like a good choice. In fact, I’d originally been looking at more modern hotels because the idea of having elevators was VERY attractive! As it happened, The Clermont did have lifts.

Ironically, as the months of planning stretched on it became increasingly obvious that the Underground was going to play only a minor role in our transport plans. Most of our routes to/from attractions were going to end up being via bus. I’m not sure if that was a consequence of the central location of our hotel making bus routes more plentiful or not. I think it is more likely that a) computer-based route-planning is now so simple that much more informed decisions are easy; and b) having now visited London several times I wasn’t so laser-focused on the “glamour” of using the Underground. Whatever the reasons, probably more than 80% of our travel used the buses.

One attraction I had to give up on was getting outside of London to Bentley Priory Museum, which was the place where the RAF managed the Battle of Britain from. It was just too far away to pair with another attraction without turning the day into a slog. I also dropped the idea of full day trips to the outer areas, since those required a 10-12 hour time commitment and were going to make breakfast and dinner challenging to fit into the schedule.

As usual, I started by trying to find interesting pairs of places to visit each day and created my strawman schedule. Then I did the normal process of mixing and matching, yanking out certain places and substituting others until I worked my way into a schedule that looked interesting and do-able. About the only thing I didn’t manage to fit in – at least initially - was to see a West End show. I could have made it work, but a 230P matinee turned out to impact the morning options a lot…and I had doubts about our stamina to do a full day of activity and then add a 730P show on top of that.

I was a bit more cognizant of down-time this go around. Most days were designed to finish around 4P, giving us about 2 hours of time to unwind at the hotel before dinner. This was similar to what was (unintentionally) built into the England and Edinburgh trip, but I was hoping that ending our day “at home” would feel more relaxing than it did during that trip, where we generally ended each day with “checking in to new hotel and dealing with getting comfy”. Additionally, I really tried to consider our fatigue level the last few days of the trip and included some less-strenuous ideas for that period.

…Turns into Planning for a Cruise

It is now March 2024. During November 2023 I had settled on a 12 day trip (10 days in London between two travel days) and had a pretty solid schedule. The thinking was that we’d do this trip perhaps as early as April 2024 – but for “reasons” we decided that this was “too soon” after our Edinburgh trip.

However, E and I have decided that we’re ready to cruise again and have noted that there’s a really interesting 15 night Transatlantic on Brilliance of the Seas departing Southampton August 31, 2025 and heading on a northern route via Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, and Boston. So we’ve decided to combine the two trips into one! However, I’ll cut down the London portion to 4-5 days, which will actually make the London leg better, since it leaves only the “strongest” destinations.

Within 48 hours of making this bold choice I’d reached out to our old travel agent (who didn’t immediately respond to me until a week had passed, during which time I’d already flexed to make the reservation online via Costco), done prelim research on the various ports of call, revised the London portion of the trip, figured out options for getting from London to Southampton, and started getting reacquainted with the CruiseCritic message boards. It is always nice how motivated I can get when I’ve got some interesting travel questions to answer!

I did reach out to Kim Royer at Avoya Travel, who handled several of our RCCL bookings previously, but I initially concluded that she was no longer with Avoya since I didn’t get the expected quick response. On a whim I checked with Costco and discovered that we could get a $540 Costco gift card if we booked through them, which seemed like a pretty good deal. No idea if a travel agent could have done better, but after waiting long enough for Kim’s response I went ahead and booked through Costco. I’m pretty sure that all travel agents were offering pretty much the same cabin pricing – it was mostly a question of what OBC or other freebies they were giving away. The Costco $540 store credit seemed like a pretty good deal, however. Eventually, I DID hear back from Kim, who was dismayed that I’d already booked via Costco. I ended up using her to book B2B trips on Harmony out of Galveston for 2025 (which later morphed into a B2B on Quantum out of Long Beach) – but I feel like booking via Costco was a better deal. (FWIW: the Costco $540 store credit was WAAAAY better than the paltry $50 per person OBC that Kim was offering!)

For all our past cruises I’d essentially booked a cabin within the first few days of release. This sailing of Brilliance OTS had been open a while, however, and therefore selection was less robust than I preferred, but still workable. All suites were sold out – not that we were wedded to a suite but for a 15-day trip I would have been interested in considering one, and the double Q&A points would have been amazing. However, several balcony cabins remained – although (more desirable) port-side cabin inventory was pretty low. Despite that, I was ultimately able to grab stateroom 9046, one of the 1B Balconies – which meant a larger stateroom (201 sqft + 24 sqft balcony). I purposefully got a non-connecting room designed for 4 people to guarantee that we’d have a full-sized sofa. I also picked Deck 9 rather than Deck 10 since I didn’t want to be immediately below the pool deck.

We had no choice re: dinner seating. All that was available on the Costco booking site was MTD. I suspected that this reflected all the early and late seatings being sold and not something specific to Costco. Up to that point we’d never tried MTD so weren’t sure whether to worry about this (and therefore try to get on the early seating waiting list) or simply wait until we got onboard. I figured I’d let things ride and we’d see what would happen. Given that we expected to book 4-5 specialty dinners and perhaps do a couple of nights of Windjammer it probably wasn’t a big deal to take our chance in the MDR. As it happens, our March 2025 cruise on Navigator (unexpectedly) ended up with MTD and we discovered that, other than an awkward first night experience, MTD at 6:45P was actually pretty nice!  By the end of the cruise we'd be sold on MTD as our default choice for all future cruises.

It turned out that MTD reservations opened up (somewhat randomly and certainly unexpectedly) on May 30, 2024 – I just happened to check on the web and stumbled on it. I was able to grab the (earliest) 6:45P options for all nights of the cruise. Having done that, I then went to the Roll Call for our cruise and made my first posting, alerting others that they could jump in, too. A 6:45P dinner, being only 15 minutes later than our normal daily dinner at home, was actually awesome, although we’d have to see how that would impact on-board events, such as shows. We were also curious to see whether Royal would shift to a 3rd scheduled seating (which would no doubt be for something like 630P or 645P if they did it) by the time of our sailing. Many folks on CC were convinced that Royal was currently testing this on selected ships/sailings, so our 645P MTD might very well end up being just a normal 645P-ish “middle seating” between early and late seating when this cruise sailed some 500+ days from the time I made the dinner reservations. (In Oct 2024 it looks like Royal was rolling out 3rd seating at 7P seating on newer cruises.)

At the same time that MTD reservations opened they also posted the first options for specialty dining. We could grab 10% off on lunch or dinner reservations at Chops, Giovanni’s, and/or Izumi, as well as Taste of Royal lunch, Izumi Sake lunch, and/or Chef’s Table. I wasn’t ready yet to make individual reservations – I was frankly hoping they’d eventually post some kind of multi-day restaurant plans at some point. So I just started tracking the newly posted offers on the Royal Price Tracker website and bided my time. I mean, I COULD have booked some random dates and then re-booked if/when prices changed, but the 10% off just didn’t seem like it was likely to be the best offer and there was a TON of time (probably more than a year, if I’m being honest) before I needed to worry about securing us reservations. My initial budget planning assumptions were that we’d end up booking Chops twice and once each at Giovanni’s and Izumi. In the end, it turned into one each of Chops and Izumi, and two Giovanni’s. (E was in favor of de-emphasizing Chops as she was feeling it was a “been there, done that” kind of place for us.)

The price tracking site started showing the first price manipulations on August 31, 2024, exactly one year prior to sailing. Up until that time, all the prices (including restaurants, internet, and refreshment package) had remained fixed. On this date all of them showed minor price drops – for example, Chops dinners dropped from $50pp to $48pp. Even though the internet pricing claimed reductions, when I did a test booking it netted out to exactly what we’d already paid, so I think they reduced the price for the first device by a few bucks but simply hiked the price of the second device. I figured I’d simply keep tracking to see if any REAL savings were going to result.

The first REAL sales started in November 2024. Apparently, November is historically the month that Royal launches their Black Friday sales. Somewhere before this I had purchased us a 3-night dining package and made a reservation at each of Chops, Izumi, and Giovanni’s. I was able to rebook all of those at minimal savings (the difference being that the package booking had INCLUDED tips while the “sale” bookings quoted prices sans tips…by the time they finally added the tips I think I saved something like $15 in total). The big win in November was that I also rebooked internet and E’s drink package at sale prices and saved about $90 on those.

Next step was to do some quick research on the ports we’d be stopping at to get a sense of what options existed. I made a connection between RCCL’s list of excursions and those offered by https://shoreexcursionsgroup.com. I was certain the latter was the actual supplier of RCCL’s excursions and was able to use their website to see the specific tours available on our sailing.

I presumed we’d do some kind of 6-8h bus tour in Reykjavik in order to see a selection of volcanos, hot springs, waterfalls, and other natural sites. (In May 2024 I was following twanger’s live sailing on Jewel that included several Icelandic ports, and it became clear that we MUST take some kind of tour here – it looks absolutely, stunningly beautiful.) The two ports in Greenland didn’t have significant tourist infrastructure and it seemed like our best bet there was to simply walk ourselves around the area – assuming we got off the ship at all. I kept my eyes peeled for trip reports over the next year to get some inspiration as to options. The (tender) port of Qaqortoq is tiny, with small buildings that look like they come from the Lego color palette. The general feeling was that the grocery store is about the only place of interest, however. Meanwhile, the capital of Nuuk is a slightly larger town with some possible self-tour options.

In August 2024 a member of the Roll Call announced that she was seeking people to join a Northern Lights tour she was organizing for our first night in Reykjavik. She was working with Get Your Guide to schedule a 19-person van that would set out around 9:30P and take up to 5 hours, depending on viewing conditions. The trip would have a go/no-go decision point around 5:30P, canceling (and refunding) if viewing conditions were too poor to even bother trying. The negotiated cost was projected to be $85 per person and we quickly emailed to secure space. We had to make pre-payment to the organizer in August 2024, at which time she had secured a lower price of $75 per person which struck us as being extremely reasonable!

I dragged my heels on considering options for the two Canadian ports (Sydney and Halifax). More when we get to that part of the recap.

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