Their visit began with a short stay in London before they headed out to Paris and Salzburg for another week. I met them in Rome after that before returning with them to London where they stayed a few more days before heading back home.

One of my favourite parts about people visiting London is I get to show them all the little inside secrets you only really get to discover when being a bit of a local – developed through time discovering them for yourself, or by talking to other people about little secrets around town. London is one of those cities where you continue to unearth any of these for a lifetime and still not be done.

My family’s visit first started with us greeting them at the apartment we’d hired for them, a nice modern apartment in the central location of Bayswater called Space Apart. It had really funky interiors and modern furnishing and had plenty more space for the entire family than either my sister or I could comfortably fit in our places. They arrived late that Sunday evening so I picked up some takeaway from one of my favourite Chinese restaurants when I used to live in that area.

The next day started off almost ridiculously early where we had to meet at the Cumberland Hotel in order to join our prebooked tour bus to head out to Stonehenge. When planning our itinerary, this was actually one of the only places that my Dad really wanted to go see. My ever organised sister found a great little tour bus that did a whole trip visiting Bath, Stonehenge and Windsor Castle in a day. Quite a bit of a whirlwind tour! Starting off at 7am, our little tour group consistently of only around 12 people headed out and our friendly Irish tour guide pointing out interesting facts and cracking jokes as we made our way out of London.

I remember it being a bitterly cold day, and since we left town so early, found ourselves one of the only parties at Stonehenge for the morning – a boon for taking photographs and taking our time to wander around the great stones. I think the family really enjoyed visiting the site, and probably like every other visit, exclaimed at how much smaller the stones appeared.

You can’t really spend that much time at Stonehenge so about an hour or two later, we found ourselves heading for the Roman ruins located in Bath. Bath had many more tourists and we found ourselves sometimes struggling to get space around the Roman ruins whilst still trying to get a good look at the baths.

My sister was right in not planning to take our parents to too many museums because our Dad didn’t even listen to the audio guide – simply rambling around looking at things until he found himself at the exit! It took us a while to work out where he actually disappeared to, not thinking he would tire of the place so quickly.

We had a bit of time to wander the town and grab lunch before we took the bus back up and around town for a bit more of a final tour before heading off to Windsor for the rest of the afternoon. I think it was rather late by the time we ended up at Windsor castle, so instead of opting to go into the castle, we decided to wander around the town. Given the trade off was only an hour in the castle, and that we wouldn’t have got much value it turned out to be a great decision since the family enjoyed browsing the stores of Windsor instead.

Leaving Windsor by the time dark started to set in, we found ourselves napping in the back of the bus on the way back to London and eventually got back twelve hours after we departed! What a day.

Given my passion for food and eating, my sister left all meals to myself to organise. Our first meal was to head up to Phoenix Palace to give them a Chinese banquet. I picked this place because it was a very nice fine dining experience with really tasty food and a very different selection of dishes including Kangaroo, Ostrich and Boar meat – something you don’t really see on the menu every day.
One Chinese tradition is for the hosts to take care of the guests, so keeping to this, my sister and I took care of the bill for the evening (as we did for the rest of the journey) despite the protests from our Dad who wanted to know how much the meal was.