In a nutshell, nowhere, not much, a lot. Four days is quite a period of time, and I originally had ideas of doing my northern Wales trip - only problem it wouldn't be so easy; not all I want to see would be possible to see and there was one bigger consideration - it would cost a bit. Which was a slight problem, since I had already committed a fair amount of funds to another trip later in the month. Remember my German trip which has so often been mentioned in previous blog posts, which at its last mention I said I had given up on it as too expensive? Well, turns out I just couldn't leave it alone, and managed to work out a way where I could do all of the main things and reduce the costs quite significantly. By almost half, actually - but that is a story for another day, after that particular trip has been undertaken. Suffice to say, the trade off was it wasn't wise to spend lots of money travelling at Easter when things are generally expensive anyway - plus its right in the middle of school holidays, so still not cheap. But I couldn't just leave it be and let the weekend slide by.
In the interest of saving costs, it seemed wise to stay close to home - but perhaps possible to do a number of day trips from London, as there was a bunch of stuff I haven't been to see in the surrounding region and here was an opportunity to do so. Slight problem with some of that - even semi-short travel outside the normal London city was fairly pricey over Easter time, and a few other ideas were not possible due to Easter shut-downs. Mind you, there was things in London itself I wanted to do and haven't got around to yet. So there was the answer - do these things I hadn't got around to, while trying not to spend too much. So how did it all go?
Firstly, Easter Friday - did not get up to anything this day. The weather was bad - raining all day, definitely an indoor day but nowhere I particularly wanted to go would see me spending long times inside without having to go out into the rain. Plus with not much open, what little was open would be packed. With the weather supposed to be improving over the other days of the weekend, I instead spent it entirely at home taking care of domestic chores. What followed on the next few days was more interesting - and I do warn you, this post is fairly long and image-laden!
Easter Saturday - The Real Monopoly
So here was the challenge - find all the locations from the Monopoly Board in a single day. There's 26 of them, by the way - that's a fair amount to cover in the space of a day, but quite possible. It would probably be possible to do them in order as you go round the board if you started early and finished late - but much more time efficient to do them in a sort of loop out of order. Part of the challenge was to find out where they were, but luckily I'm not the first person to think of doing such a thing and there was a couple of helpful maps or blogs online. Amended slightly, I came up with the route and the order in which I'd visit them. Saturday was the chosen day, and about 10am I left home and set out. Below, in the order they appear on the board, are the Real Monolopy locations:
Easter Sunday - Greenwich
Easter Monday - The Triple Treat
So Monday morning, I travelled to Victoria Coach Station - London's major bus terminal, from where the tour was leaving. First task was to go to a kiosk near the appointed departure gate and exchange my Viator ticket for one from the tour operator as the ticket said - turns out Viator are a reseller, not a provider of tours themselves. The tour operator was Even Evans - no less than the company which sounded good but had been quite a bit dearer; I was getting the same tour, and a lesser price than they charged. So that was a win! While waiting for my tour bus to arrive, I watched other buses depart - the first time I had been at Victoria for a departure, and it was clear it was not an easy and was almost as much a faff as catching a plane. Not like catching a train, which you jump on at the platform and your tickets get checked when the train is underway - a much easier and faster process than the bus. The tour buses showed up, for all the different tour options, and I hopped on my bus. First up was Windsor Castle, about an hours drive from London, during which time we were treated to a commentary by the very informative and funny tour guide. He did mention that because of the nature of fitting in the 3 destinations, it would be a bit of a "highlights" tour and not a comprehensive one - a bit sucky, but just the nature of the beast.