London turned on beautiful weather for our return visit. I took Dale to Covent Garden, which was busy with street performers and shoppers, and every table outside the cafes and restaurants seemed to be full. We walked by some of the Covent Garden institutions - the Punch and Judy bar, Rules (Winston Churchill's fav!), the Maple Leaf (obviously Canadian) and Walkabout! We ended up on the Strand and continued our walk around the Monopoly board by continuing on t...

In the grips of Olympic hype, London had been transformed since our last visit 3 months earlier. Brightly dressed volunteers stand on hand at the airports, tube stations, Tourist attractions and, of course, Olympic venues - smiling and ready to help confused tourists. Signage has been added about the city, on public transport, and to tube maps, pointing out the way to Olympic sites. Temporary bars and restaurants have popped up in the parts of the city most vi...

Wide awake at 3am, our day got off to an early start. By 8am we had checked our emails, read the paper, consumed a full English breakfast plus two cups of coffee, and set off in search of a laundrette so that when we depart for Morocco tomorrow we have a suitcase of clean clothes. The laundrette was a 10 minute walk away, but there was plenty of interesting things to see en route (the hard-sell from the day before continues...) including the house where Mozart...

Dale and I touched down at London Heathrow at 12:52pm on Thursday 17 May 2012. To get there, we had travelled from Auckland to Sydney (around 3 hours), Sydney to Abu Dhabi (15 hours), and Abu Dhabi to London (7 hours). Despite stopovers in Sydney (5 days so that Dale could attend an orthodontics course) and Abu Dhabi (2 days), we were red-eyed and weary when we ambled off the plain towards customs. By the time we were seated on the tube and rocketing along the...