London Times | Kew Gardens

We're back from our trip to the UK, and I'm going through all the photos I took. I'm pretty much a chronological person and I hope to relive our experiences one day at a time here on the blog. While I won't feature all the photos on the blog, I'll include a link to each day's flickr photoset.

I took my daughter and one of her high school friends to visit London and the UK. We are fortunate that my sister and her family live in London and so generously put us up in their west suburb home. They also acted as our day trip planner, transforming our vague ideas of what we wanted to do into concrete plans. By the end of our visit, the girls were comfortable maneuvering the London Underground by themselves (yes, I let them and yes, it was scary for me to let them go out on their own).

We took a daytime flight direct from Chicago to Heathrow - this was a change as normally I would book an overnight flight - but the adjustment over to the new time zone was so much easier with the day flight. The flight left Chicago at 10am and arrived into Heathrow around 11pm. By the time we got through customs, retrieved our luggage and arrived at my sister's home it was past midnight - just in time to get a good night's sleep and awake the next morning half decently refreshed.

We decided to visit Kew Gardens on our first day.
The girls were excited to step out in the sun:


En route, we encountered fresh air markets:



And my daughter bonded with her cousins:


The grounds were spectacular:



Yeah, there are flowers, too:


Water Lilies:


A huge picnic table, set with edible plants:


The rains came after lunch and we cut our visit a little shorter than expected, but what we saw was just beautiful. I have an old Tube Station poster I bought when I first visited London in 1989. The featured Tube Station was Kew Gardens and I felt I had to finally visit - it was truly worthwhile and a great start to our vacation.

Here's the link to the entire Set. More photos to be added as I get them uploaded:
Click to view slide show