Today we leave Taunton and start the last leg of our holiday trip to England. We’ll spend the next few days in London before returning home on Friday. It’s a three-hour drive to the Westfield White City shopping centre in the west of London. Here we want to recharge LucY’s battery, and also visit a restaurant and a shop that are only available here. We make good progress while listening to the audio book by Wil Wheaton, who we know as Wesley Crusher from the Starship Enterprise (D) and playing himself in The Big Bang Theory.

We arrive at Westfield at 1.30 pm. We hook LucY up to the Supercharger and then look for the restaurant: Bleecker makes really good burgers! They even asked us how we want the burger patty cooked, and cooked it perfectly. Then I move LucY to a regular parking spot as the charging is already done.

We go into a shopping frenzy at Bath & Body Works! This is one of the few branches of the cosmetics store outside of North America. The scent of their shower gels is simply unrivalled. Is it excessive to spend over 100 GBP on shower gels? Yes, but they will last us at least half a year or even longer.

We also make a quick stop at the Lego store we’re walking past. The Classic Space astronauts have recently become available in a dark blue colour very recently, and you can only get them at the minifigure table in Lego stores. Here you can assemble minifigures as you like and then buy them: Torso, legs, head, headgear and an accessory of your choice. Unfortunately, there are no classic helmets, only new ones that look different, and no airtanks, but still!

Then we drive on – to the other Westfield shopping center, Stratford City in the east of the city. So we drive more or less straight across London, along the Northern part of Hyde Park, and then along the major roads past the big railway stations, Euston, St Pancras, and King’s Cross, and thus through an area that we know very well from the time we lived here. Although it is only 28 kilometres instead of the 260 from Bristol to our first stop, it takes us two hours to arrive at the hotel.

For once, it’s not the Premier Inn where we usually stay here, but a Hyatt Regency Hotel. It’s not at the end of the shopping centre, but right in the middle, which is much more practical for our purposes. The room is really nice, of course much more upmarket. We even have a small fridge here!

For dinner, Gabi gets a Korean corn dog half & half, which is a sausage on the bottom and a cheese stick on top, deep-fried in a batter. Very similar to an American corn dog, but slightly sweeter. I try the ramen noodle soup at a new ramen restaurant and am very happy about it. It really is very tasty.

There’s also a Lego store in this shopping centre. So I go there for a while after dinner… until the shops close at 9pm. I put together a few more astronauts and take a box full of Lego elements from the Pick a Brick wall. I will put them to good use in my new Lego room.