Castles, Cake, and Open Road

We started our first full day in London at Harrod's, the largest department store in Europe (and maybe the most crowded? It was packed!) In addition to floors and floors of clothing and designer displays, it also has a food hall and a tea room. Fish, cheese, meringue puffs, chocolates, pudding...if you want to eat it, you can probably find it at Harrod's. The real question is whether you want to stand in line for it.* *That's a picture of Harvey Nichols, also famous but I'm too lazy to switch them out...just fyi.  My favorite part of Harrod's was the displays--fantastical and over the top. They also had a Mary Poppins snow globe you could go inside of and get a picture, but I don't like Mary Poppins $10 worth, so we skipped that bit of fun and contented ourselves with seeing the costumes in the window.  A dead ringer for Meghan Markle in my navy coat, obviously.  After Harrod's, we started our walk to a Georgian restaurant ...

Most of today was spent in travel from Madrid to London, which sounds like it should be jiffy quick but in actually is hampered by a long customs line to get into the UK. I'm not sure if it's always like that or if it's a result of Brexit, but regardless it took over two and a half hours to get through. (The girl in front of us fainted and was carted off in a wheelchair...it was all very dramatic.) But once we were through the line, we hopped into a taxi and whisked through some countryside as the sun set and then into London, which is decorated for Christmas like Santa himself lives there. Our hotel is the Park Tower Knightsbridge, across from Hyde Park, and the lobby is lovely. Since we had 9 p.m. dinner reservations at a restaurant called Celeste in the nearby Lanesborough Hotel, we stopped for a quick drink at the bar...even the drinks taste like holidays. A hotel we passed on our walk, all lit up... A Christmas tree made of Valhrona ch...

Almost every vacation (that we take at least) has one day that's just a disaster, and this time around it was the day we went to Avila and Segovia. We were supposed to get up at seven and make one long day of it, but unfortunately the maids closet or prep room or something was above our hotel room, so as they cleaned up from Christmas we heard dragging carts, clans, thumps, and footsteps all night long...well until eventually we yelled at enough people at about 4:30 am and it mysteriously stopped. So, we ended up getting up at 11 am instead and blitzed through the two towns. I didn't get to go inside the alcazar or wall the walls, so I'll just have to go back.  The first town we visited was Segovia, which is most famous for its Roman aqueduct. The aqueduct was probably built in the first century AD and is one of the best preserved in the world...pictures can't do its size justice. At its highest point it is 93 feet fall and provided water to the city until the mid...