For London, one thing I highly recommend that seemingly very few people know about is the
Mail Rail – you get to ride in these tiny retrofitted rail cars along the lines that used to shoot mail across London.
If you’re in the area of the Natural History Museum, I recommend checking out the Science Museum next door.
If you want to do something a little bit odd there’s the
Grant Museum of Zoology.
I’m acquaintances with him so this is unapologetic shilling, but Matthew Curtis has an excellent book on London pubs that you can find
on Amazon. I’ve shown excerpts before
in this thread; I can also take photos when you figure out which neighborhood you’re staying in. Pub food is often surprisingly good so don’t miss out on having a pie there. If you want higher-end I’ve enjoyed Rovi and St. John’s Bread & Wine, and generally speaking you can choose
any restaurant here that has either Ed or James in parentheses and it’ll probably be good.
Unlike
Nathan my heart is more in Manchester than London, so LMK if you end up wanting to go there. I’d also love to recommend a bunch of other cities like Nottingham and Newcastle etc. but for a 10 day trip with a family I suspect London + Manchester + County Kerry is the max you’d want to do. Don’t fly to Manchester (or any other cities within England), take the train! Though admittedly there is the problem of there occasionally being a strike by the train workers.
Also general pieces of advice:
- Lots of cobblestones, so be aware that if you have a roller bag it’s going to make a racket.
- Everywhere in London supports just tapping your phone to enter a bus or the Tube, and they do all the fare-capping calculations on the back end to minimize the amount you’ll pay across a week.
- A lot of crosswalks in London have painting on the ground telling you which way to look before crossing the street, but personally I find it just cognitively less taxing to always look both ways. And outside of London you don’t usually get those instructions.
Faroe Islands is definitely on my list.
The nice thing about Svalbard is that despite how weird the location is, it’s both easy and not terribly expensive – once you’re in Oslo it’s like a 3 hour flight for ~$300 roundtrip, and everything there costs about the same as mainland Norway (except beer, which is
cheaper than the mainland). My hotel was $150/night and included a great breakfast buffet; I just spent $150/night this week in a hotel in LA that reeked of pee.
The thing that got me interested in going to Svalbard was the
Extremities podcast, starting with the “Arrival on Svalbard” episode, and specifically because the show talks about how easy it is to get and be there (relative to other northernly areas like northern Alaska). They also have seasons on Pitcairn and St. Helena if you want other far-flung places.
