Walking In A Winter Wonder London

It was the first Saturday in December, and appropriately cold as we assembled early in the morning for our Winter Wonderland trip up to London.  We'd wrapped up warm, brought spare socks along, and checked our bags for important essentials (money, tickets, strawberry liquorice laces).  Later on we'd realise that we'd forgotten some more important items like drinks and, in the author's case, normal glasses (as opposed to prescription sunglasses) but hey ho!

A fortuitously chosen fast train landed us in Central London and we made our way straight over the the Natural History Museum for our first adventure - ice skating.  The rink at the Museum is great - fairly big and with a Christmas Tree in the middle - the skating session lasted 50 minutes and everyone had great fun getting gradually more and more confident on the ice. 

Next stop was Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, so we jumped on the number 74 bus, complete with super fast, slightly scary bus driver, and headed up past Harrods and House of Fraser to Hyde Park Corner. 
Winter Wonderland is a big festival in Hyde Park with food stalls, a Christmas market, fairground rides, Santa's Grotto, and Ice Rink, a Circus and an Ice Sculpture walk.  We headed in to the crowds, with the first aim of finding food.  Typically we all wanted food from different stalls, so we waited while we all ate.  And then ate some more.  Crepes, burgers, steak sandwiches, chips, sweets, candy floss and pretzels.  That was between five of us, but even so! 

We wandered through the market area, which was very long and extremely busy.  It was also really cold on Saturday, and despite us being well wrapped up, we reached a point where it was too busy, we were too cold, and suddenly the idea of going somewhere warm where we could sit down was rather appealing.  So we decided to carry on with the Christmas theme at the cinema and go and see Nativity 2 at the cinema! Which of course meant popcorn and fizzy drinks....

After the cinema we completed the Christmas-sy-ness by popping our heads very quickly into Regent Street to see the lights there (and take some mandatory blurry photos) before heading back to the station to consume the remainder of the candy floss and sweets on the train!

It was a great day, and I think we're all up for a London 2013 trip!