London in September

British Museum, Tower of London, River Cruise, Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and the Queen Mary Doll's House.

Quick Tips:

Use hop-on-hop-off buses as a orientation tool, and get the most out of your days by using the nights as well. Utilise times on sitting excursions, such as the River Cruise, to have snacks such as afternoon tea; this means you don't have to lose valuable sight-seeing time stopping for meals and drinks.

Best Way To Get Around:

Hop-on-hop-off buses or taxis if you're in a large group; otherwise, they are expensive.

Brilliant position, booked via the Internet for much more competitive rates. At the time, we paid 160 GBP per room and had to take two rooms to accommodate the five of us. This was nearly half the price quoted by similar establishments in the tour brochures, where they wanted a per-person rate, not a per-room rate. Price was even better when we arrived and found where it was positioned. The street the motel was positioned on led straight down to the Ritz Hotel, and we were only one block from the Ritz and Green Park, right in the centre of Mayfair. Not even a five-minute walk to the nearest bus routes, Underground, and central to major attractions. The rooms were nicely appointed, and the staff was wonderful. Considering our flight arrived at 11pm and we arrived at midnight, the staff were extremely helpful and courteous. Hotel was tastefully decorated with heavy chintzes and Regency stripes and looked like it had been receiving people up from the country for their London visits since the turn of the century. Everything was clean and immaculately presented. Nice restaurant and bar area, which we didn’t get to use due to lack of time, but it always seemed to be popular and from overheard conversations in the elevator, had a lot of return clientele. Doormen in appropriate London dress -- topcoats and polished buttons.

With very limited time in London, and a number of people with a passion to see the British Museum, we investigated the web and found that on a number of nights of the week (particularly Thursday and Friday), certain galleries remain open to the public till 9pm. This was a magic time to go, and we were lucky enough for the Assyrian and Egyptian galleries to be open the night we went. The entry dome at night is magic and gives you a feeling of immense space; this was accentuated, as the normal crowds were non-existent. One gift gallery at the entrance is still open and the reading room and restaurant are also open. We arrived at 5pm and stayed until closing, then caught a taxi back to Mayfair and picked up quick tea from one of the Marks and Spencer takeaway shops. We took this back to our hotel room so we could collapse, having been on the go since early morning after a 21-hour flight the day before.

The museum’s collection would probably need at least a week to do it justice, but the night viewings allow one to see the selected galleries in a much shorter time, due to the lack of crowds. They change which galleries are open on a regular basis, so it’s best to check the museum website for the schedule openings for the month you are planning to travel.

Entry was free. I can’t remember whether it was with our Great Britain Heritage card – I seem to remember that a lot of the public museums are free for viewing standard collections in England, except for special exhibitions. The website will tell you

The familiar red double-deckers go hanging around the tight, cobbled roads of London just like the magic bus in Harry Potter. How they don’t collect the overhangs on some of the buildings that seem to jut out above the traffic never ceased to amaze me.

The buses take a number of routes and have conductors/guides who give a running commentary in various languages and point out the major attractions and a little history as they hurtle around the city. Your ticket lets you on and off at various sites along the way as many times as you like in one day. We found it a very good orientation tool and would use them again. In fact, my 77-year-old mother (active), who travelled with us, was quite taken with one of the guides, who had us laughing the whole time, and she would happily have just driven around the city all day, listening to his amusing anecdotes of London history. Do the river cruise towards the end of the day; it is pleasant to grab a cold drink and collapse in a seat on the boat and view the city from a different and much quieter aspect of the river. There are also excellent photo opportunities of Big Ben and some of the other riverside attractions that you can’t get from the roadways and footpaths.

Beware and check the maps you receive if you pre-book your tickets, as the routes change depending on the season. We waited at the first bus stop for quite a while before we decided we should walk further up, as we could see plenty of buses on the next corner. When we showed the ticket collectors our map, they said we had a summer map with more pick-up points. They quickly swapped our map for a current one, and we set off on our journey of discovery. The buses arrive every 15 minutes at most sites and are easily identified. The maps provided are in a naïve style but are very clear to read, as they are based on landmarks and major roads. There are two major companies that run these buses, but we used the "original" company and found them excellent. If we had been staying longer, we would have purchased a second day (offered for a cheaper rate once you have had a one-day ticket) and done another route or two.

They also have an excellent website, which we discovered just before we left home, that shows some of the routes they offer and a little information about them. Much better than the five-line blurb in a travel brochure.

The Palace itself was beautiful, though much smaller than I expected. The Palace has only been opened to the public for a few years, and only for a short season each year -- well worth a look, in case the royal family decides they want to stop these excursions through their London home.

I would never use Evans Evans tours again. We pre-booked this tour prior to leaving home, with the understanding that you had to pre-book Buckingham Palace; otherwise, you would not get in. It cost $98 per person for what was advertised as a three-hour tour, finishing at lunch time at the palace. When I received our Great Britain Heritage Cards, booked after the Evans Evans Tour, I found we could have gotten in for free with these but may have had to wait up to two hours for entry, depending on the queues. Not having to wait in the queue was the only good thing I have to say about how the tour was operated. We made our way to the pick-up point at about 8am, and the tour was scheduled to start at 9am. The bus took us a whole 10 minutes away to Victoria Bus Station, where we were transferred to a larger coach and sat in the depot til nearly 10am. We then were taken on a tour of the city with a guide who had the most annoying voice and mannerisms and did not do as good a job as the much cheaper hop-on-hop-off buses of the day before. We were taken to the Albert Memorial and the Victoria and Albert (but not allowed in), and we were taken to Kensington Palace and walked through the park and stood at the fence for ages (but again, were not allowed in) and then dumped at Westminster Abbey to purchase a cup of tea (again, with strict instructions to not go in, as the guide didn’t want to have any trouble rounding anyone up). All these sites were open to the public and had virtually no queues at the time we visited.

We were then dumped at Buckingham Palace at noon (nearly lunchtime), the time the tour had been advertised to finish, as the guide said to "do the palace and the gardens on your own." In truth, we would have been better off just going and waiting at the palace queue early in the morning or with the tour taking us to one of the places mentioned and letting us go in and do it properly; it just felt as if they were wasting time till they could throw us at the Buckingham Palace staff. Consequently, we had to fly through the palace, as we had booked a hire car at 1pm to drive to the South of England that afternoon. I still don’t know what we actually paid the bus tour for, as they did virtually nothing and even had the hide to made sounds like they should receive a tip!

Read the brochures carefully before booking trips, and try to confirm the information that appears to be there and that you are getting what you think. Our brochure said that the tour ends at the palace at noon, where you are free to continue exploring the gardens; that really meant that, once you were passed to the BP staff, the whole tour, not just the gardens, was on your own. We actually missed the gardens, as the car company would only extend our pick-up time by an hour, and we had to be in Lymington to book into our timeshare by 5pm. There were a number of groups on the bus from Australia who felt they had been mislead and, like us, were scrambling to try and change the arrangements they had made for the afternoon when we made stops.

Having had my whine –- the hand-over to palace staff was extremely smooth, and the organisation of that staff saw us very promptly guided through their various entry protocols without having to sit and wait for admission. We were travelling in September and were near the end of the palace’s opening season. If you were travelling in the peak season, the ability to just walk straight in on delivery would be an advantage, so one may use a tour company to gain access. Just read the fine print carefully so that you know what to expect.

Brilliant. Incredible collections from different eras. The Queens Gallery and Queen Mary’s Doll's House were fantastic. The only downside was the lighting in the Doll's House area, which was so dark to preserve everything that it made it difficult to view the finer detail that had obviously been put into the work. The scale was very grand for a doll's house, and the attention to detail was incredible. The storyboard area showing the reconstruction after the fire was also extremely interesting.

Hold changing of the guards at Windsor, as well as Buckingham Palace. We arrived at 11am in time for this and then explored the castle itself. Although, we did this as a day trip from our timeshare, Walton Hall, it was approximately an hour-and-a-half trip and would have taken nearly as long from the centre of London, given that it was mostly freeway -- three-lane roads -- all the way from Wellesbourne to Windsor. We timed it to leave just on the tail-end of the morning traffic on advice from the staff at Walton Hall. We arrived just before the 11am changing of the guards, which left us plenty of time to explore and still allowed us to be home in time for tea. Free on Great Britain Heritage Pass, about 11 pounds per person normally.