If you like antique or flea markets, a trip to Portobello Road Market is a must if you’re visiting London. Portobello Road Market is a series of shops and stalls that run for almost two miles on Portobello Road in London’s fashionable Notting Hill area. At Portobello, you’ll find not just antiques and collectables but also vintage and new clothing, furniture, household goods, bric-a-brac, fruits and vegetables, restaurants and pubs.  I went to Portobello Road Market in...

Electric Avenue is the Brixton, South London street that gave its name to the song that was No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the summer of 1983. I know the song and started humming it immediately after I spotted this sign above a row of stalls in Brixton Market last summer. However, I did not know about the street.  What a happy coincidence, I thought as I stopped to take this photo....

Leaving Chastleton House, we drove directly to the Secret Cottage, which is about 5 minutes away. Built in 1580, the cottage has the typical thatched roof, with kitchen and living room downstairs, and sleeping quarters upstairs.  When we arrived, we were greeted with a colorful spread of scones, clotted cream, cookies, jams, coffee and tea.  With its crackling fire (sorry, no pics of the fireplace or the family’s living space), the cottage felt so cozy,...

The Cotswolds covers an area of approximately 100 miles from Chipping Campden in the north to Bath in the south, and about 25 miles from Oxford in the east to Cheltenham in the west. The region is covered in oolitic limestone, called Cotswold stone, which varies from honey colored in the north, to golden in the central areas, and cream or white in the south. The stone is mined from...

Oxford, in my mind, is probably as equally well-known as a university town as it is for the television series about the fictional detective, the opera-loving, often morose, Inspector Morse.  Despite its strong connections to Oxford and the university – Colin Dexter, the author of the novels that the series is based on, worked at the University of Oxford for more than twenty years – Morse, a brilliant and perceptive detective, surprisingly did not...

Stonehenge was a bit of a disappointment when I saw it in 2011 and for several days after, I tried to figure out why. One thought was that Stonehenge could not compare to the inflated images I had in my head – images that had been shaped by television, stories I had read and my own very fertile imagination. Another was that my mind was still fresh from seeing the...

After leaving Stonehenge, we drove through the English countryside towards Bath, arriving there just before lunch. Named  World Heritage Site in 1987, Bath is a picturesque city located on the Avon River in Southwest England, and part of the south Cotswolds. Its well-known Great Bath (Bath Spa) and historic Georgian structures attract more than 250,000 visitors annually.  What Not to Miss in Bath: The Royal Crescent – Designed by John...

I didn’t plan to return to Stonehenge – the Neolithic stone circle located on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. I’d been there only a few years ago, in 2011, to be exact. It was during that tour that I heard about Avebury. If you like Stonehenge and have time, the guide said, you should visit Avebury. It’s quite impressive! I was intrigued. I couldn’t imagine anything more impressive than Stonehenge....

Now on view at the London Film Museum is Bond in Motion, a must-see permanent exhibition that traces the history of the franchise through the many vehicles (cars, boats, motorbikes, sleds, jets, helicopter and more) that James Bond used over the years. I’m a huge Bond fan, but I hadn’t heard about this exhibition until I spotted an ad at a tube station in London in August, 2015. It didn’t disappoint. As...

In the Take I on InsideJourneys’ 3rd blogiversary, we looked back at the trip to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Lesotho, that inspired me to start blogging. The year following that momentous trip, I visited London, Paris and Toronto. Here are some of the photos I took: Usually, I stay clear of tourist traps but on this, my third trip to London, I decided to do some touristy things, like stand...