London, England Winter Day Trip

Our first Malaysia trip after Covid. Ticket price is sky high. We explored different way to lower the cost and ended up using points to book our award flight with United. The one way ticket flight has a transit at London, England. We purposely chose a long transit in London, so we can get out for a quick day trip. We have done some research and if weather permit, we could at least visited a few places for a 13 hours transit. Do check ahead of time if UK visa is required, even for a short visit.

Right before we boarded our flight to London, we heard some bad news from our friend where their flight to Singapore transiting at Manchester which is located north west of England has been affected because the airport was closed due to snow storm and flight was rerouted and much delayed, and later they were stranded at another airport. Oh no! That's the risk of travelling during winter time.

London is further south and the weather forecast is a little better. It started to snow the day before our flight land and got pretty cold and wet. Although it wasn't ideal for our self walking tour, we are still much fortunate than the other flight.

One thing we learned is that any transit more than 12 hours will required the luggage to be checked out and reclaimed at the transit airport. We weren't expecting that since it was a transit on the same booking. We claimed our luggage and put it away at a luggage storage service for about gbp 30 (for a duration of 12 hours).

More detailed map and fares could be found on Transport for London website.

We scanned and paid with our cashless credit cards (we used the ones without foreign transaction fees, one for each adult) for the lube ride. The great part of London lube is that it capped at gbp 14 per day. Kids under 12 year old are free with paying adult.

We took the lube from the airport to the Green Park station. It was like a winter wonderland when we got out of the station. It was white and beautiful. Kids had some snow play and it fun for them.

We have a short walk to the Buckingham Palace. Took some pictures and then walked to across the St James's Park towards the Horse Guard Parade.

The park is beautiful even covered with snows. At The True Bridge of St James's park, you can get a spectacular view of Horse Guard Parade, Big Ben and the London Eye.

The kids didn't have the snow boot and glove and their feet got pretty cold. We stopped at the St. James's Cafe for some hot coffee and took a break for brunch.

After that, we check out the popular guards and the Horseguard building and walked toward the Big Ben. We originally planned to do a river boat tour at River Thames but we thought it is too cold and cloudy. Instead we just strolled a little bit around the Big Ben area.

We later took the lube from Westminster station to the Tower Hill Station. It wasn't crowded as Big Ben and we got a pretty good view and strolls around the Tower of London and the magnificent tower bridges.

It was about 3pm so we took the lube back to the airport (which takes about 1 hour). The line at the check in counter was already long and it took about more than 1 hour to check in our bags. It took slightly less of another hour to clear the custom. We were glad to be at the airport early.

Mommy and gege had dinner at a restaurant while daddy and didi went plaza premium lounge with the American Express Platinum card lounge benefit.

That conclude our short London trip and continue our Journey to Southwest Asia.