AD Exploring London with Travelodge

A few weeks ago I was asked if I fancied exploring London with Travelodge and writing about what I did in the area I visited. Obviously I wasn’t going to turn that down and so I invited my friend Claire to come with me. I don’t go to London often but I always enjoy a couple of days in the city-and opted for the beginning of October, midweek, as we’re both currently freelancing. I usually stay at an Air B n B in most cities I visit, I just find a home away from home better than a hotel and it’s so useful to have a kitchen and a washing machine all to myself.

If you’re in London and have a spare room, or a home you’re not at every day, you’re probably sitting on a goldmine, I know if I was in a city I’d be getting onto Air B n B with my spare room. It can be difficult to manage a rental yourself though what with taking decent photos, managing bookings and check ins and advertising your property so that it’s seen by enough people to get the bookings in. It also sounds like it’s complicated to organise insurance and work out how much to charge for your room or whole place. That’s where an Airbnb Management company can come in. They do all of the things I’ve mentioned and more, and help to get your property seen on Air B n B, Booking.com, Expedia and other relevant sites. Check them out if you want to make some extra cash from your space.

Whilst planning this trip I arranged the trains so we could have the maximum amount of time in London (32 hours in total, from 12 on the Tuesday to 8 on the Wednesday) and we put our heads together to decide on a few things we wanted to do. We’re both really into our photography and appreciate a good wander around with no plan, so we didn’t want to schedule every minute of the trip, but we did have a few things we wanted to see. Here’s what we got up to!

Tuesday

We arrived at Kings Cross Station and headed straight to our hotel to drop my suitcase off. They were lovely and had no problem with storing it for us until we got back and were able to check in-handy. We then walked back to Kings Cross and got on the tube to Shoreditch, as we really wanted to go street art hunting and Claire had been reading about BoxPark, a new ‘pop up’ mini shopping centre with different places to eat. We found so much street art, ate some gorgeous food, and had a little spend in Deciem‘s shop there. A fantastic start to our trip.

Once we’d been fed, watered and seen some fabulous art we headed to over to Liberty Of London (I’ve never been) and Selfridges (because of the Beauty Hall) before calling in John Lewis for a phone charger for Claire and a cuppa for both of us. We then decided to walk across to Covent Garden, passing through Chinatown (where I’ve also never been) to get some food. I love Covent Garden and we were able to pop into a few shops before they closed, before admitting defeat and heading back to our hotel for a takeaway and tv night. 21,ooo steps tired us out!

Wednesday

After a frankly brilliant Travelodge breakfast (I just love when you can have 3 different fruit juices, a fry up, some toast, a croissant and some cereal if you want to) we got a red bus to our first stop, the Tate Modern. I’d suggested we go here to see the new Superflex One Two Three Swing! exhibit.

Sadly we couldn’t spend too long at the Tate Modern as we had tickets for a surprise I’d booked…SkyGarden! I’ve written a separate post about this place as it’s just too good for only a paragraph, suffice to say you should definitely go!

After Skygarden we headed to Camden for the afternoon, to hunt out some more street art, look around Camden Market and get some food. I tried my first ever vegan meal (it was quite nice, but vegan cheese sauce is not the one) we found more street art and did some shopping. Then we realised just how shattered we were, and went back to Kings Cross Station where I sat on the floor for two hours until our train and Claire kindly walked back to the hotel by herself for our case. That is a true friend!

Thank you so much to Travelodge for sending me on this trip, Claire and I had a fantastic time. What would you do with a couple of days in London?

*This post is in collaboration with Travelodge, who gave me a free nights stay and contributed towards my train fare in return for this post about what I got up to. All thoughts, words and opinions are my own.