This weekend has been an adventure already, and its only Saturday tea-time!! I would like to share with you, the Coldplaying Road Trip!!

 

Having managed to secure the Friday off work, we booked two nights at the Wembley Travel Lodge, and sat back to wait for the 29th to roll around!

 

Thursday 29th Jan

 

On Thursday, it was a mad dash home from work when I finished at 5pm, to get changed. I also had to throw the last minute bits & pieces into my bag. The important things like outift, make-up bag, and camera were already packed, but I needed to add toothbrush, hairbursh etc.

 

About 18:15, we had loaded the car and set off. Ian had the Edith Bowman session with Chris on CD, so once we hit the motorway we stuck that on the radio, and laughed the miles away. It was a fairly uneventful trip down. The roads were reasonably quiet, it was dark, and it was cold. We stopped at the services at Warwick for a toilet break. Ian is the king of picnics, and when we got back to the car he produced the picnic bag :D After a luvverly snack of ham & pickle butties, hard-boiled egg, rhubarb yoghurt and a cup of coffee, we headed off again.

 

About 4 hours after we set off from Manchester, we rolled up at the Wembley Travel Lodge. We'd picked on them because a) they had saver rooms left; b) they had reasonably priced parking; c) they were outside the congestion zone; d) they were on the Bakerloo line, which connected to Piccadilly Circus without having to change tubes; d) we're staying there in Sept & it gave us a chance to check out the area.

 

We checked in, and headed up to our room on the 5th floor. A quick text to Mich to share some excitement, and then we headed for bed. No way I was going to be tired on Friday.

 

Fri 30th Jan

 

We knew we wanted to be up reasonably early, as we had to head into London and get breakfast. Whilst Ian had a shower, I had a quick peek out of the window, and it looked like the weather was on our side!

 

The view from the Travel Lodge - Park Royal

 

Once we were ready, we headed out and walked down the road to Stonebridge Park tube station. The nice lady at the ticket office kindly didn't rip us off when we asked for an anytime day ticket @ £8.60 each. She very patiently explained to us that there is only 1 peak period, which is before 09:30am, and that we only needed the £6.30 off-peak ticket.

Having walked up the stairs, we were in luck and, there was a tube train ready and waiting for us. 30 mins on the Bakerloo line and we were at Piccadilly Circus.

 

We headed to Leicester Square to grab a Burger King breakfast, because we had meal deal vouchers. As we walked to Leicester Square, someone handed us a promotional flyer for the Sports Cafe at Haymarket. We had our breakfast and decided what to do next. We didn't need to be at Absolute til 13:15, so had a couple of hours to be tourists. Ian decided he wanted to check out the National Gallery so we walked down Charing Cross Road towards Trafalgar Square.

 

The National Gallery was so cool. We just walked through a little bit of it, and managed to find the rooms with some of my favourite artists in them. I absolutely love Monet, and its the first time I've ever seen any of his paintings other than in books. Also saw some Degas, Van Gogh, Constable, Turner, and some Italians. The Gallery itself is very impressive. At one point we walked under a domed, windowed roof, which had beautiful carving & paintork on it. It was very over-whelming.

 

After the Gallery, we headed back out into Trafalgar Square. We stopped at the top of the steps to take some pictures of Nelson's column & the square.

 

Trafalgar Square from the National Gallery

 

 

Nelson's Column

 

As we came down the steps, there was a guy on the pavement doing chalk drawings, he suddenly got up and started shouting. It turned out that someone had come up and taken a picture of him drawing, and he was very angry that they hadn't asked if he minded.

 

We walked down towards the fountains, and took a few pictures.

 

One of the Trafalgar Square fountains

 

We went for a walk down Whitehall because I wanted a look at Downing Street. Last time I'd been down to London near Downing Street, there had been people coming & going through the gates and I couldn't really stop to look. Before we hit the police gates, we walked past Horse Guards, and stopped to take some pics. The soldiers weren't in their usual standing places because of roadworks outside, so we walked into the yard. It still amazes me that people & horses can stand so still and ignore everything around them.

 

Horse Guards

 

We didn't really stop at Downing Street in the end, as there were roadworks, and half the buildings had scaffolding up. I persuaded Ian to walk a bit further down the road towards the Houses of Parliament. I had an ulterior motive. I knew that, in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, we would find the church that my great-grandparents were married in 108 years ago, and I wanted some pictures.

 

St Margaret's, Westminster. To the right of the church tower you can see a bit of Westminster Abbey.

 

We decided to head back up in the general direction of Absolute Radio then, as we weren't sure how easy it would be to find Golden Square.

We got the tube at Westminster, took the Jubilee line to Green Park, and then changed for the Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus.

 

We walked up and found Golden Square pretty easily. I spotted the radio station, and Ian spotted a few people hanging round outside with cameras.

We had around an hour til we were due at the radio station so we found a bench in the square, and sat to enjoy the sunshine for a bit. I texted Mich, and we sat and watched the paparrazzi for a bit. There was lots of activity around the Square. There were people stood outside buildings & sat on the benches having a quick cigarette. Plenty of couriers whizzed past on their motorcycles. And there was a group of people taking photos of a woman walking through the square. She looked to be some sort of model and was tottering on impossibly high heels, practically falling over as she did. They had some changes of shoes with them as well.

 

As we started to feel cold, we went for a walk up the street, and I grabbed a hot chocolate from Greggs. We stood outside, with the growing crowd, and observed all the activity immediately outside the radio station. At about 13:10ish the crowds started to go in, so we headed in with them. Waiting outside to see Chris arrive wasn't an option. We wanted to see him perform, not walk down the road. We stood in reception with the rest of the people, and saw Chris walk through on his way in, with Phil following behind him. We stood around in reception for a while, whilst they did what ever they were doing upstairs.

 

I won't repeat the Zoo Session bit here, as you can find it in this thread. There are about 3 or 4 posts with info from the sessions. Needless to say it was absolutely awesome, and I'm still on a high.

 

When we came out of the radio station, there were still people hanging around waiting for a glimpse of Chris. We decided this would be a good point to get something to eat, so we headed off for the Sports Cafe to see if there buy one get one free offer was any use. It was so we had burger & chips and a drink. The restaurant bit was cool, we were in a booth and you had your own tv screen, which you could flick through to whichever sports channel you wanted. There was also a dimmer switch so you could set the light in your booth as you liked. I had a Mushroom Swiss burger which was lovley. I don't think I've had melted Emmental on a burger before and it was delicious.

 

Once we'd demolished the burgers, we decided to head back to the travel lodge as we were both tired, but we also wanted to be back in time to listen to the Steve Lamacq show.

 

More to follow :D

thankyou very much for that Jenjie. A very interesting read.

Warwick services are nice.

 

Just be careful not to stay there over the time limit though as the contractor employed for parking is really strict, stay there for 2 hours and 1 minute without paying and a fine is in the post.