I've been plotting a shoe shopping morning in London for a good six months. Just a few blocks from Princes arcade and Jermyn St I was all made up. I dragged the family along, can't decide these things without Gab. We window shopped through half a dozen stores I wanted to visit, Barker (my current boots), Church's, etc but it was Loake that won out. I'd had 4-5 people recommend them, I liked them so much I bought boat shoes too. I remember the loo...

It was still a boiling night, though by 6am the cloud started to roll in and notched the temperature down what felt like 10c. We had our last breakfast in Madeline, and waited for an Uber van. The kids found a metro vent working right out the front - where was this yesterday?  Off to Gare du Nord, we could find the perfect place but we re-did the photo on the concourse just four years later. All morning Boo was asking if we were going to get a "Paddington" trai...

It's our last day in London and we were set to cram as much in as possible. by 9am we'd done three loads at the laundromat and were heading off to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guard. Parental failure: after 20minutes of waiting Emerson asked why we were queueing for the 15th time - I told her there was a big parade with Fairies and Mickey & Minnie starting soon. No matter how impressive the band and marching was it was never going to live up t...

I'm in London still, though I'm a lot happier about it than The Waifs. Today we made it to St John Hotel for breakfast just minutes before end of service, we're getting pretty good with the tube eh? We didn't really have a plan apart from getting to that part of the world. A short stroll later and we realised M&M World was on the corner. The kids went nuts. I went off to look around for a little while, by the time I made it there Max was running at me screami...

Stupidly early start from Paris this morning. Planned, I think, to make parting easier. Side note, I've watched season one of the Wire and Sons of Anarchy on the bus during this tour, must get more of both. Properly sad as border control stamped my passport at Calais. We saw the colapsed cliff face at Dover as we landed. Looks to be only a kilometer or two up the coast from the port. It made the news when it happened while we were away so it mustn't happen that ...