Day 5 – London – Harrods & the Natural History Museum

So today we braved the train and weather and went into London. The bus takes us to the town center in Richmond where we can then get on the underground. The train is an “overground” for the first few stops and in between the 2^nd and 3^rd stops, there was a pinging noise. The girls thought it might be hail and they were correct. A few hail stones bounced in the train from the slightly ajar windows. It was a downpour for maybe a minute and then it stopped. It was very odd and very nice that we were inside the train and not outside under our umbrellas.

We arrived at our destination which thankfully I had remembered correctly – HARRODS! The girls had received some $$ from both sets of grandparents so they wanted to spend it – or at least a little of it in Harrods. We set out to find the toy section – which is really not an easy thing to do – that store is HUGE! We found it and somehow spent almost an hour to find some activity boxes for the girls to do back at the house.

Next, we were starving so we made a stop to a restaurant called COSTA – similar to COSI or Panera and grabbed a quick bite to eat. Then, we were off to our final destination – the Natural History museum. We had gone there in January but has only 1 hour to spend and completely skipped whole sections. So we returned to visit the RED section which was all about the earth. We learned about volcanoes and earthquakes – we actually got to see what it felt like during an earthquake. We saw rocks & gems and learned about the solar system – Pluto is still a planet on their big wall J. We ventured into the Green section but did not stay too long as the dinosaur exhibit was under construction. It is very similar to the Smithsonian Natural History museum and the girls had a lot of fun. And we got to fill in one of the squares for summer bingo.

Then back on the underground, had to make one switch - which we easily navigated since we had done many switches on the tube in January - and we were back in Richmond. Made our daily quick stop at the Tesco – needed more milk as the largest size we can find is a ½ gallon – then back on our beloved Bus 65 and we returned home. It was quite a long day.