Day 4 - More London, More Uncle

Day 4 - More London, More Uncle #westhighlandway2024

Ok, time to head out to uncle's for breakfast and then he mentioned possibly a tour of the Royal Albert Musical Hall and Buckingham Palace... This is not helping the "feeling like a small child with a real adult leading you around" feelings

This means today the hunt for a good breakfast pastry and coffee is paused.

New sky color just dropped

Had some breakfast, he lives at the opus dei residence here which is huge. Apparently they bought it rundown right after WW2 on the cheap because I can't imagine what this property would cost now. Made some eggs and certainly better than the pastries we'd had so far.

Here but a bit early as our tour starts in 30

Tour was really cool, guide was really engaging with fun facts. Apparently Queen Victoria spent the money set aside to build it on the giant gold memorial to Prince Albert that's across from it so they had to sell seats to all performances for 999 years to fund it

We got to see the royal box, royal entrance and royal waiting hall, they even blocked off the staircase of their entrance to prevent going/coming from upstairs.

AThe hall seems really cool, during Promenades aka "Proms" they hold gallery and floor seats until day of and sell them for 8 quid regardless of content. They also do events from Chess Boxing to Cirque du Soleil to Classical to Rock. Very fun tour, do recommend

Rushing to Buckingham Palace for the next and this taxi driver is a riot, he hates the UK and is very funnily ranting about it. Just really going on about how completely trash it is. Should have recorded it, top quality content

Much like Windsor we couldn't take photographs inside so here's some from the guidebook for context but once again the opulence and sheer different worldliness of this is kind of unreal.

Like I can appreciate the design style even if it's way too busy for me and hey have some really amazing art but the thought it's like a person or family owning all that is just like... Did take this pic from the outside where we could take pics

It was raining quite hard as we exited but it abated fairly fast. We stopped for some royal ice cream on the way out which was quite passable to be honest. After this it was time to figure out lunch

Walked through a nice park on our way, if you're a long time reader you know I love these "hallway" effect shots

Went here to Caffé Concerto which was pretty ok, don't know if I'd go back mainly because I'm not a huge fan of restaurant Italian but it was fine. We did order way too much, missed a pic of some mozza sticks too...

Walked back through Hyde Park and Kensington gardens, even for a random visitor, then said good bye to my uncle and thanked him for helping set up he day

As we split off before the hotel Farah's tickle at the throat got worse so I went to buy some cold meds to try and avoid it getting worse before hiking, pharmacy nearby closed at 6 due to Sunday so it became a longer route. Hopefully tomorrow it'll turn out to be a false alarm!

Now we rest and see what tomorrow brings besides heading to Stansted Airport for an EasyJet flight to Glasgow.