Today was the last day of the half term, if you don't count the weekend, which I don't. Therefore I felt it should be 'trip' day. I try to take the children out to some sort of attraction once in each holiday week, if possible. This doesn't include trips to parks etc, more your zoo, museum type things. Living in London, we are spoilt for choice and are also very lucky as many of them are free.
It was going to be London Zoo today, but thankfully a spell of cold weather has coincided with a slight cash flow crisis (have you seen the admission charges?!), so that was discounted. I left the children to decide between themselves this morning, having given them the option of three museums (with free entry) and they came up with the Natural History Museum.
Many, many other households had obviously made the same decision, but hey, it's half term, what else can you expect?
We are old hands at the Natural History/Science Museum visits here in the Wool Palace. Before the museums (re) introduced free entry (2 or 3 years ago I think) they used to do an excellent season ticket offer, where you paid about £25 for a year's unlimited entry to 'the big three', Natural History, Science and V&A, which I always took up with gusto.
This means we are able to plan our itinerary before we leave the house, always handy in crowded holiday times. The Dinosaurs are out (way too crowded), as is the exploration centre thingy with microscopes (even the staff tell you not to come during the holidays - go first thing on a Saturday morning and you'll have it pretty much to yourselves). Today was a pared down little number - stuffed animals and the Darwin Centre, as Sam currently wants to be a scientist when he grows up, although he's not too keen on the idea of university not providing school dinners at lunch time.
With a short break for lunch (packed of course, see cash flow crisis above) this was all accomplished in a couple of hours and then we headed to the V&A. Up until now, I've always thought of the V&A as 'too grown up', but we had a great time today. The children loved looking at the reproductions of classical statutes and we played fun games picking which artifacts we'd like to take home with us. I think a return visit is definitely in order. I'm proud to say I brought today's visit in for the grand total of £2.40, which is my bus fare there and back (children travel free on London buses).
I knitted on the back of Woody on the bus there and back; I'm about a third of the way in, so there's some heavy duty blocking action coming up in the very near future. Retro Rib sock 1 is done, bar the toe grafting.
I've had some wine this evening so decided to postpone grafting until tomorrow to avoid an ugly mess tonight; I'm speaking from bitter experience here.
Very nice! Best of luck getting started on the second one. :)
Posted by: a | February 21, 2005 at 03:54 PM