Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

After nearly a week working on my London guidebook, I’ve reworked my proposed plan for the best seven days of sightseeing in this exhilarating city. It’s my best mix of balance and efficiency, partly dictated by opening hours…but I think it could be better. (References to self-guided walks and tours refer to those chapters in the book.) Any suggested improvements are welcome:

Day 1: 9:00 — Tower of London (crown jewels first to beat the crowds, then Beefeater tour, then White Tower); 13:00 — Munch a sandwich on the Thames while cruising from Tower to Westminster Bridge; 14:30 — Tour Westminster Abbey; 16:30 — Follow the self-guided Westminster Walk. When you’re finished, you could return to the Houses of Parliament and pop in to see the House of Commons in action.

Day 2: 8:45 — Take a double-decker hop-on, hop-off London sightseeing bus tour (start at Victoria Street and hop off for the Changing of the Guard); 11:00 — Buckingham Palace (guards change most days, but worth confirming); 13:00 — Tour the British Museum; 16:30 — Covent Garden, shopping, and people-watching (consider following the self-guided West End Walk). Have a pub dinner before a play, concert, or evening walking tour.

Day 3: 9:00 — Follow the self-guided City Walk from Trafalgar Square to London Bridge, inserting the full St. Paul’s Tour in the middle; 14:30 — Follow the self-guided Bankside Walk along the South Bank of the Thames, then walk the Jubilee Promenade from the Millennium Bridge to the London Eye. Cap the day with South Bank sights or experiences open in the evening: a ride on the London Eye, a Shakespearean play at Shakespeare’s Globe (19:30 in summer), the Tate Modern (open Fri and Sat until 22:00).

Day 4: 10:00 — Tour the British Library; 13:00 — Tour the National Gallery and Portrait Gallery. Free afternoon and evening.

Day 5: Spend the morning at an antique market. Spend the rest of your day at your choice of major sights: Depending on your interests, choose from Tate Britain, Museum of London, the Imperial War Museum, or Kew Gardens (cruise to Kew, return to London by Tube).

Day 6: Cruise from Westminster to Greenwich, tour the town’s salty sights, then ride the DLR train (Pudding Hill Lane stop) to see the Olympics 2012 site. Next ride the DLR to the Docklands (Canary Lane stop) for a look at London’s emerging “Manhattan.” Finally, Tube back to London.

Day 7: 10:00 — Tour the Victoria & Albert Museum; spend afternoon at Harrods or other shopping.

With more time: If you have more than one week for London, I’d spend a day or two side-tripping. To keep an English focus, head out to Windsor, Cambridge, Stonehenge, or Bath for one day. For maximum travel thrills, consider a Paris getaway. With the zippy English Channel train, Paris is less than three hours away and can even be worth a long day trip.

What a great city. In all of Europe, I’d say only Rome, Paris, and Istanbul can keep a week so full of blockbuster sights and experiences. I need to come back to London for a vacation. And with the pound almost at par with the euro, the city suddenly seems relatively easy on the budget.

(Two days later: I’m loving your suggestions. I’ll tweak the week plan and put up the refined version soon. Any more suggestions?)

It’s 4 a.m., the birds are chirping out my window as my first full day in London dawns, and I already feel remarkably well set up. I also marvel at how quickly a traveler can settle into the learning and stimulating wonder of being far from home.

My flight was slick. I love a nonstop Seattle-to-London trip. Just under nine hours (four hours of work, one hour for dinner, then pop a quarter-tab of Ambien to get four hours of sleep, happy to wake learning I missed breakfast, eat my clean-the-cupboard peanut butter sandwich from home as we touch down)…and I’m at Heathrow.

On the flight, I met Tim Dearborn from World Vision. He appreciated that, in our radio program on the subject, we addressed the generally overlooked foundations of structural poverty in what he calls “the majority world.” Getting engulfed in a great conversation with Tim and his family reminded me how many inspirational movers and shakers in the area of developmental aid call Seattle home. They invited me to share their cab into town, and I wanted to join them — but I needed to get into researcher mode, so I declined.

Heathrow’s Terminal Five is Space Age. I just love it. I made a point to get as set up as possible here. First up: Get my cheap little Nokia phone I bought seven years ago in Italy working today in London. There was a vending machine selling SIM cards, but I went upstairs to the Vodafone shop and saved a third by getting my card there — £25 and I have my local British number, I can text home for virtually free, and I can talk (at 20p a minute) to anywhere in Britain for 125 minutes.

Rather than pay £45 for a taxi ride into town, I bought my seven-day Oyster Card transit pass, which will get me into town and give me unlimited Tube and bus rides for a week for £30. I updated my material on Heathrow, swiped my black Moleskine notebook (with the Oyster Card tucked into its back cover pouch) against the pad to open the turnstile, and stepped onto the Tube train. For an hour, the mellow recorded voice reminded me I was bound for Cockfosters. Then I was on the street in South Kensington, marveling at the people-friendly changes to one of my favorite London neighborhoods. Someone told me the new pedestrian plaza around the Tube station is part of London’s spirit of getting the city sorted out and spiffed up for the 2012 Olympics.

After dropping my bag at my hotel, I had three hours of museum time left. Wanting to hit the ground running, I dashed to the Natural History Museum. Since this is the Easter week holiday, there was a 20-minute line of families queuing to see the dinosaurs. I talked myself in with a guard to do my research blitz without the wait, and loved the place. Charles Darwin sat on his throne below a giant slice of Sequoia. Rooms were closed not “for renovation,” but because “we are evolving.” Things were put in perspective: The elephant was big, but it looked like it could be a dangling charm on the sperm whale’s charm bracelet. In the mineral vault, exhibits were great — such as a chunk of Mars (with an explanation of how it got here) and the Aurora Diamond Pyramid of Hope (showing, with 296 radiant diamonds, the entire spectrum of colors nature makes them in).

Popping into the always-thrilling Victoria & Albert Museum, I got up-to-date on its collection. It seems to give life to other collections whose museums close. The old Theatre Museum from Covent Garden is no more, but the best of its collection now resides smartly at the V&A. The dazzling Gilbert Collection from Somerset House (one of my favorites in London) was closed for years. Now its masterpieces (jeweled snuff boxes of Peter the Great and the exquisite Grand Tour-era micro-mosaics of Rome) are well-displayed here. And the big buzz about the new Medieval and Renaissance Europe wing is truly buzz-worthy.

I spent my evening reviewing South Ken restaurants, and was pleased to see that prices here are no longer brutal. In fact, they felt much the same as in Seattle. The pound is almost on par these days with the euro. That’s why so many Europeans are enjoying London. And our dollar isn’t that bad against the pound, either (at about $1.50 — rather than close to $2, as it was for years). There are plenty of thriving little restaurants serving £10 meals. And now I see why bad English cuisine is a blessing. The “local” cuisine here is perfectly global — I visited Indian, Polish, Italian, French, Turkish, and a “gastro-pub” before finally sitting down to a great Lebanese meal.

London feels like an Obama commercial. I’m white, and I think I’m getting it. As a casual visitor, I don’t sense any majority/minority tension. Someone shook everything up. Maybe it’s like confetti falling on a colonial capital after its greedy empire blows apart. Maybe like a bag of M&Ms, there’s no particular flavor. You can’t say what color the world is. It seems nearly everyone speaks English as a second language and is respectful of the obligation for all to be good neighbors to live closely together in this great city.

Picking up my ritual package of chocolate-covered digestive biscuits at Tesco, I returned to my hotel thinking that to be in London and to enjoy it — either as a tourist or as a resident — is a blessing, not an entitlement.

It’s that time of year when flowers bloom and travel dreams morph into reality. I’ve enjoyed a flurry of emails and chance meetings in the last few days — crossing paths with friends and neighbors who are Europe-bound, and helping them sort through all their options.

And today I fly to London. I’m kicking off 40 days and 40 nights of travel learning. Our mantra here at ETBD is “content is king,” and that’ll be my focus in the next month and a half as I update our guidebooks to London, Venice, and northern Italy. (I’ll spend the day after tomorrow with a London Blue Badge guide learning all about London’s 2012 Olympic plans and its thriving Docklands.)

After the guidebook research, I fly to Granada to meet my TV crew as we produce an hour-long prime time special on Andalucía that will air nationally to kick off our new 11-episode series on public television this fall.

And, even more than all of this, the travel teacher in me is most excited about our new Rick Steves’ Audio Europe podcasts — an extensive array of audio files now available for free via iTunes. We’ve gathered and sorted all our audio tours and radio interviews by city and country, so wherever you’re heading, you can log on, grab, and go.

I just downloaded our new audio tours of London’s top sights. And, just for fun, I’ll be guiding myself (via one my audio tours) along Venice’s Grand Canal and through the Frari Church (one of my favorite artistic experiences in Europe).

They say consumer confidence is picking up. America is getting back to work. America is embracing life. And, for many, that means exploring our world. Maybe I’ll see you in Europe.