For anyone who is going to London for the very first time, I strongly recommend these tours, which are a great deal cheaper and much more fun than the outrageously priced bus tours. London can be so overwhelming on a first visit, and deciding what to do can be near impossible. I believe that the best possible way to begin is to take the Westminster tour on the morning of your first day, which covers the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St. James Park, and a slew of other things, and finishes in Trafalgar Square. You'll be left with enough time to take a leisurely lunch and then set out to join the City of London Walk, which includes the Monument, St. Paul's, the Temples, the Tate Modern, and the Tower. These walks are very well-run, super-informative, and entertaining. Each one lasts 2 hours, and they're also very good for helping one learn one's way around. There are also a host of other, more specialized walks dealing with particular areas or particular subject matters.

Original London Walks has been around for about 45 years and has become a favorite with both visitors and residents - it actually is the original walking tour company in London. The guides are probably the most knowledgeable and entertaining in the industry, and you’ll learn many obscure facts and have the chance to see many areas within the city that the average visitor would never know about. Each walk is about 2 hours long, and you can find one at almost any time of day.

The topics run the gamut -- recent walks I’ve been on include Christopher Wren’s London, The Victoria & Albert Museum Tour, Old Westminster – 1,000 Years of History, and Strictly Confidential – The Distinctly Different Royal Route. They were all well worth the time (I’ve actually done the V&A walk twice – it was different both times.)

This group also hosts "Explorer Days," which are full day excursions, mostly to areas outside London. These are good deals; you get the same great guides, free time to explore on your own, and the train tickets are discounted from what you'd pay if you went on your own. Explorer Days go to places like Bath, Stonehenge, Oxford, the Cotswolds, Brighton – sometimes they're combined – a half day in Oxford, a half day in the Cotswolds, for example.

I recently went on the Salisbury and Stonehenge Explorer Day. We took a train ride out to Salisbury, had a guided tour of the cathedral, an hour or so for lunch, then we took a bus to Stonehenge where we had a private tour of the stones – you really can’t beat the knowledge these guides possess – and then we returned to Salisbury and had about an hour on our own to shop or whatever before returning to the train station. It was a full day, but well worth it!

London Walks also does evening walks, mainly consisting of Pub Walks, and of course, the famous Jack the Ripper walk. The cost is reasonable – £6 for a walk, £11 for Explorer Days (plus the tariff for train tickets). They also have a Walkabout Card, which you pay one pound for at your first walk, then all additional walks are one pound less – £5 or £10. It can be a good deal, but even the guides will tell you that it’s only worth it if you plan to go on more than, say, three walks. Visit the London Walks website for lots more information and detailed descriptions of the walks.

The new husband and I took an afternoon to visit the British Museum. While there, we purchased a glass tile, which references our birth dates. The purpose of the glass tiles being sold by the museum was to raise funds for the enclosure of the buildings included in the British Museum complex. The British Museum is a great place to visit.

Across the street from the museum is a comic book shop (a favorite of the husband). I would quote the name of it if I could remember. Again, it’s another great place to hit.

You could take a long walk from Notting Hill to Whitehall through four of the best -- Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park, and St James's Park almost without a break.

Often overlooked are the capital's Victorian cemeteries. These peaceful beautiful yet spooky and eerie wildernesses of gravestones and ornate tombs sometimes contain the graves of eminent former Londoners

Brompton Cemetery (www.royalparks.gov.uk) and the Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, among others.

Bunhill Fields Burial Ground covers four acres and was founded as a cemetery for non-conformists in the early 1700s. Among the notables buried at Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/cj.tolley/nch-bunhill.htm) are William Blake and his wife Catherine, John Owen, Daniel Defoe, Susana Wesley, John Bunyon, and Isaac Watts.

Kensal Green Cemetery (Harrow Road, London, W10; tel: 020 8969 0152 www.kensalgreen.co.uk) boasts the graves of classic novelists Trollope and Thackeray and the groundbreaking Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom.

For more than 40 years, The Original London Walks has been offering visitors and locals alike the opportunity to see sights in London where tour buses can’t go. Tours range from the royal (Strictly Confidential) to the flamboyant (The London of Oscar Wilde) to the inebriated (nightly pubwalks in different neighborhoods) to the downright scary (Jack the Ripper’s Haunts, especially when led by Donald Rumbelow). You’ll not only see famous sights (or places that should be), you’ll likely learn a fair amount about the history of London and its workings.

On this trip, I took the Legal and Illegal London tour. Our tour guide Gillian met a group of about 40 people, mostly British and American ranging in age from 7 to senior citizen, efficiently collected our fees, and led us away from the busy Holborn tube stop to Lincoln’s Inn. We sat in the chapel and heard about the medieval origins of the British legal profession, the difference between barristers and solicitors and the practice of leaving babies in the undercroft to be raised by the members of the Inn. Continuing the walk, we got a glimpse of court (legal, not royal) attire in a shop window, found out why 18th-century aristocrats slept with silver mousetraps on their pillows and learned why you don’t want to find yourself in Carey Street (it’s the home of the Bankruptcy Court in London).

We made our way through Carey Street from Lincoln’s Inn to the Strand, where we stopped to look at the amazing Royal Courts of Justice. Its architect, George Edmund Street, designed a number of churches in the High Victorian Gothic style during the mid-19th-century. According to Gillian, Street never got his wish to design a cathedral. Instead, he lived out his dream on the home of Britain’s highest civil courts.

Crossing over the Strand, we entered the Inner Temple, another of the Inns of Court. Formerly the London headquarters of the Knights Templar, the Inner Temple houses a beautiful 12th-century round church, whose design is based on Middle Eastern churches the knights encountered while fighting in the Crusades. We walked through the Inn’s precincts (luckily, none of us had a dog, as signs were posted prohibiting non-residents from bringing them onto the grounds) and passed into the Middle Temple.

A £10 "tip" allowed our group into Middle Temple Hall, which was being decorated for Christmas. Built in the late 16th-century, the hall contains a table that seems to be about 50-feet long that was made from planks from a single tree. Turn around, though, to see the most incredible feature of the room. An elaborately carved wooden screen surrounds the entrance. Virtually destroyed during the Blitz in World War II, the restored work appears flawless.

I would highly recommend any of the London Walks tours. Check out their website for walk details and schedules. At £5 for a two-hour tour, it’s one of London’s best bargains.