Scavenger Hunting through the UK with a 7 year old

*** DAY 1: Hello London ***

We had a 9PM EastUS flight out of Boston, and rolled into the hotel at 11AM UK time. The kid had rested on the plane and was ready to party! And Mom and dad were ready to nap! Jetblue gives out blankets and sleep masks for free, and we cosplay sleep for 5 hours but get no actual sleep. At the room we do get a nap as our kid somehow plays quietly for 3 hrs.

I chose Premier Inn Victoria in order to streamline the travel day as much as possible: we flew to Gatwick, the express train goes to Victoria station, and then it’s a 10 minutes walk to the hotel. They critically have early check-in (for a small fee), the room was clean, the location was central and quiet. It was just right for us and I strongly recommend it. This said: it of course is a chain hotel and lacks charm. London in the summer is quite expensive: I had to ignore pretty much all of Rick’s recommendations due to price, and even this “economy option” was 200GBP / $270USD per night. Yowza.

OK, it’s finally funtime. We head out at 3PM and emerge from the Tower Hill tube station to an amazing panorama of the kiddo’s favorite things: Tower Bridge, cool skyscrapers, a castle! He doesn’t even notice all that because: pigeons! After a round of giggly pigeon chasing, we head to the Thames and across the bridge. Tower Bridge sure is a looker: this lives up to the hype. We don’t go inside at this time because the kid says he’s not ready to, and we’re all hungry.

We grab take-away gyros from “The Real Greek” and have a picnic in potters field park (I bought a waterproof pocket beach blanket on Amazon and keep it in my backpack at all times). We pick up an overpriced hot dog at a vendor but we throw it in the garbage because the kid says it’s “not like back home” (it was a longer German style dog). We had additionally packed a sandwich+fruit lunch box as a backup, so all was well. Half the park was closed for an ugly installation for the live action Moana movie, but there were still a couple shady trees and enough room to run around. The views of the bridge are unbeatable: what a great place to hang. We have arrived.

We grab ice cream, head out, but one block away realize we lost Skippity (the stuffy of choice for the day). We find him on the grass in the park then head over to Butler dock just in time to walk on to the “Thames River Sightseeing" boat (I didn’t buy in advance as I wanted to have a flexible entry time). It was perfect weather, we got the top deck, the spiel was entertaining, and the kid wasn’t bored. Life is good.

We get out at Westminster, get some Big Ben photos, and grab a quick tube back home. To bed by 8PM (1AM for us).

*** DAY 2 Kensington ***

I knew we’d be still collecting our circadian rhythm bearings, so I planned for a laid back day at a park. Instead of the more popular Lady Diana Playground, I decided to “zig when they zag” by instead checking out Holland Park. We tube to the High Street Kensington station. (After taking a train going to the wrong branch: oops. We quickly learn to be sure to double check the termination. Also: the TFL Go mobile app is great). The walk along High Street and through the park is lovely and full of mostly locals.

I have a sensory kid: he is overwhelmed by too much sound and large crowds. Victoria Station and the tube in general were pretty tough for him. I didn’t consider large noisy museums such as Natural History, etc. But I did consider smaller quieter museums: in the south corner of Holland Park is the free and moderately interesting “Design Museum”, and we popped in. With a kid, you want to make a beeline to the top floor: there’s interesting stuff on the walls, and an art table. My kid loves quietly doing art and this held his attention for a full hour, so this was a win. They also have a kid’s explorer trail booklet if you ask for it, but this one did NOT peak his interest: it was light on “find the thing” and heavier on asking open ended questions.

By noon we make it to the adventure playground in the north end of the park. It has seen better days: almost half of the smaller playsets were walled off for repair. What was open was great, especially the showstopper center play area. A sure sign for a fun playground is when they have to make a sign warning that the slide is really fast. Nothing beats a good metal slide: very rare in the US these days.

We spent at least an hour there before heading out for lunch. I’d planned on getting an outdoor table at “Daisy Green”, which did look super lovely, but was closed for a wedding. Headed down to High Street for my backup pick, Megan’s. This is a local Turkish chain with an interesting menu, and gorgeous yet non-pretentious inside ambiance. And any menu with Shakshuka is instantly a winner in my book. Recommended.

For the afternoon, we tried our first public double decker bus and loved it. Much easier for our sensory overloaded kid and in every way quieter and more interesting than the tube.

Our stop: the V&A. Yes I broke my own rule and chose a potentially noisier museum, but what can I say: the wife and I just really wanted to go. And they do have a scavenger hunt phone app, which we try immediately: it’s honestly not the best, but my kid loves it anyway and we get lots of mileage out of it. We particularly love the central garden that has a fancy wading pool. So cool! We all take off our shoes and tromp around for a good half hour.

We get a little bit of mileage out of doing silly impersonations of the baroque marble statues. Even more entertaining: the kiddo is fully in the “what’s that?” and “why?” period of his life, and it was fun trying to explain such beauties as “The Rape of Prosperine” and “The Flaying of Marsyas”. We were amazingly at this museum for over 2 hours before his interest finally waned.

After a hellish tube back to Victoria during rush hour, we vow to take the bus instead whenever possible. Not fun times. Much better fun: dinner. The area around our hotel (Pimlico) has lots of good family options, and I chose the Mildred’s, a Vegan local chain. This place ruled: excellent menu, exceptional quality, and has a kids menu (as does pretty much every sit down restaurant I chose). The only acceptable restaurant meals right now for my kid are: chicken tenders / chicken patties / hot dogs / sausage / pancakes, and every kid's menu would have at least one of these.

*** DAY 3: Cheese Grating ***

We head back to do the inside of Tower bridge and get there at 10am, which successfully dodges the larger crowds. We then grab a double decker bus from the south bank and take it back across the bridge: a great moment. Destination: the modern skyscrapers in the middle of the City of London. This was a must-do given my kid’s interests.

They do have a lot of interesting shapes: we got pretzels at the base of “The Gherkin”, and we also checked off “The Cheese Grater”, “the Walkie Talkie”, and the Lloyd building on our way to the Horizon22 observation deck. I had given a lot of planning thought to observation decks, and there’s a bunch of them: sky garden, the garden at 120, the lookout. They’re all free, but do need advance reservations. Horizon22 was great: low crowds, low noise, smooth entry with about a 20 minute wait for security, and awesome floor to ceiling windows in all directions.

Next stop: the Waterloo Station Treasure Trail. https://www.treasuretrails.co.uk/ is a… ahem.. treasure trove of $10 trails for kids for every major city in the UK. This one caught my eye because it traversed the Leak Street tunnel, and had a silly premise (pigeons attacking the London Eye with loudspeakers??). I preprinted it on my home computer (there’s also an app) and I read my kiddo the premise before we left for the trip, so he was semi-looking forward to it. It was a rough start: Waterloo was of course loud and chaotic, the street outside equally so, the first clue was hidden by construction, and we were really hungry. I picked up take-away at Waterloo (Cornwall Pasty) and had planned on taking it all Jubilee Gardens, but that wasn’t until deeper in the trail so we ended up eating at the Waterloo Memorial Green, just southeast of the station. Not worth going out of your way for. But the next area is: Lower Marsh street is awesome. Car free and full of murals and international street food. This was not on my radar and I’d for sure recommend it for adults. Not a ton of good seating for kids, and we already had food, so we continued through.

The next bit was on my radar: the Leak Street tunnel is a former train tunnel that, thanks to Banksy, has been reclaimed as a pedestrian-only haven for graffiti artists to legally create their work. And quite randomly but interesting to my Pennsylvania wife: also home to a Philadelphia themed cheesesteak restaurant. Sure? We head through and come out on the Westminster Bridge side to massive crowds. We do a few more treasure trail stops, but the Kid is getting very overwhelmed: we get him a smoothie and make a beeline to Jubilee Gardens (behind the Eye).

We set up our blanket and take a break. There’s a nice lawn for pigeon chasing, and a nice playground that was only moderately crowded: we spent a good hour here resting. We did a couple more treasure stops but cut the rest of our treasure trail short: it was overall OK for us, but has a lot of puzzle solving and word unscrambling. Would be better suited for kids that can read (my kid is just out of kindergarten).

The Jubilee Bridge enticed us across, but it put us right back into even more noisy crowds. We headed to a bus stop ASAP and headed home for some room downtime. Dinner down the street at Giraffe (a UK family chain with a global menu) was great. We sat outside amongst the distant sounds of barbarians attacking (locals in pubs watching the FIFA world cup).

Keep going! Very interesting reading and I have no 7 year old kids!

Loving this trip report! (And I don't have a 7 year old either.) You are clearly an excellent travel planner.

This is great! I just pretended I was 7...

Wonderful, fun trip report! We used to do something similar when our son was little, but we were nowhere as organized as you are. Bravo!

I love this trip report. I especially love how tuned you are to your sensory kid's needs. Also the scavenger hunts. We were recently in Portland with our 3 adult children and 2 grandkids. We visited the Rose Garden and one son put together a scavenger hunt for the grandkids. "Find the darkest rose, find a rose with 'princess' in the name etc". They had a great time running all over the gardens searching for roses.

I want to be your seven year old! How fun!