From 29 October to 15 November 2014, we’ve been on holiday to the UK once again. Here’s our itinerary: 29 October 2014: Driving to the UK 30 October 2014: Basingstoke and Frankenstein 31 October 2014: Top Gear Track Experience 1 November 2014: Bluewater 2 November 2014 (morning): Bicester Village 2 November 2014 (afternoon): Oxford 3 November 2014: Legoland Windsor 4 November 2014: Resting day 5 [Weiterlesen]

Every journey to the UK ends with eating all the donuts that we’ve brought along. We and the in-laws have become very good at this. 🙂 (above: before, below: after)

After a great last day, we have to say goodbye to London and the United Kingdom. Thank you for having us! We enjoyed ourselves a lot over here and will be back for sure. We held back from buying much more things and everything stows away in the car better than we thought. We’ll have a bigger trunk next time nevertheless. We leave the hotel [Weiterlesen]

In the evening, we listen to a talk about the Arecibo message at the British Film Institute. It’s hard to believe that it’s already the 40th anniversary of this radio message that was sent from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico hopefully to be received by extraterrestrials one day. I have been fascinated by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (aka SETI) since I was [Weiterlesen]

We arrive in the Southbank area mid-afternoon. We have tickets for a talk in the evening around here. The weather is fabulous – as it was during most of our journey. We enjoy the silence and having nothing to do and spend a very relaxed last day of our holidays. During sunset, London appears at its best. Above: the London Eye. Below: the Parliament with [Weiterlesen]

This morning, we’re at the BBC Good Food Show which takes places over the whole weekend at Olympia. A lot of stores and chains have stalls here and many newcomers present their sauces, jams, chocolate, meat products, curries and more to become know to a broader audience. In the evening, Jamie Oliver will broadcast his latest Food Tube show live from here. But we already [Weiterlesen]

Let’s have some more culture today! Nathan Sawaya builds art out of Lego bricks. The exhibition ‘The Art of the Brick’ shows an enormous amount of his Lego sculptures which are more than impressive. There are really big ones, e.g. a life-size T-Rex sceleton, but also very small ones. I still wonder where he got than many Lego bricks, and, can I get some as [Weiterlesen]

Today, we’re visiting the Museum of London with a temporary exhibition about Sherlock Holmes. It presents the London the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived in with many paintings from that time, there are lots of videoclips of the several Holmes that have been on screen since, and a huge display with items such as magnifying glass, pipe, hat and coat that became the consulting [Weiterlesen]

Today, we sleep in a bit and then head out to have a look around our neighborhood by car. There are lots of hills and on top, you find the most amazing and surely most expensive mansions. There are Ferraris, Porsches and many many Range Rovers parked at the roadside. We then continue to the city centre and look about from the car window. Meaning: [Weiterlesen]

Our visit to Blechley Park is one of the highlights of our journey for sure! On the one hand, Alan Turing, father of computers and IT, has developped a machine to decipher the Nazi’s enigma code during World War II, which used an incredibly difficult endocing that changed daily. In achieving this, he shortened the war by an estimated two years and saved millions of [Weiterlesen]