A day out to London

Yesterday Lucy and I had a trip up to London. After my last unfortunate experience with trains I was very anxious to arrive early at the local station to secure our tickets to travel.
Fortunately for us, we were able to park easily and the ticket office was open.
It's actually very good value taking a child out for the day to London. I bought a One day Travel card for £14.20 and Lucy's ticket was just £1.

A couple of days earlier I'd been wondering what we should do in London, all very well saying lets have a day out but thinking of something that would might both mine and Lucy's approval is another thing.

If it had just been me, I'd have loved to have gone to the Royal Academy to see the Russian collection, the Matisse etc, but when I suggested that to Lucy, she gave me that look of horror, "no, not an art gallery, please!"

I was browsing the Saturday Timesand saw a section of what to do in Half term, it's mentioned an exhibition of Space age travel at the V & A 's Museum of Childhood.
I thought that sounded interesting and to be honest I'd always wanted to go to the Museum of Childhood, so looked on the website:
www.vam.ac.uk/moc

It looked good, so told Lucy and she seemed quite keen.

So we took a packed lunch and headed up to London Victoria and on the Underground to Bethnal Green. Found the Museum very easily, it is very close to the station, we had our sandwiches sitting in the park next door to museum. There were a couple of pigeons pottering about so I throw a piece of crust, and suddenly we were engulfed with pigeons, where had they all come from? How did they know a little piece of bread had been dropped? Lucy was in a panic as they came so close , flapping and fluttering at us. decided it was time to move on, gave rest of crusts and darted off towards the exit!

The Museum is FREE, that was a big bonus, to actaully go somewhere for nothing.
It was fascinating, full of old toys of all sorts and all ages.
My favourites were the Old Dolls Houses, some were massive, copies of real mansions, made for the children of the house.
Lots of Teddies,including Paddington Bear,



Other Dolls,cars and games, it was packed with interesting things to see and do. Lucy wasn't that bothered about the Space Age stuff, probably more for boys, but she still enjoyed all the other things.
We stayed for about 2 hours and then headed back to Oxford Street and hit the shops . I needed to find an outfit for Lucy to wear to her Grandparents Golden Wedding Lunch. Gosh, she is soooooooo fussy, won't wear pretty dresses, I found so many lovely dresses and tops but "no way!" was she going to even try them on! Which was a great disappointment to me. Eventually she settled for a checked skirt and top with a little matching waistcoat, very nice in it's own way, but not really dressy enough, I don't think. This is what comes of having Fashion conscious elder sisters. When they were her age they would still wear what I suggested, Just about anyway!!

We headed back to station and back home to sussex, it had been a good day , tiring and we both had head aches, ( What is it about going to London? Always end up with a headache!)but most enjoyable.