As you can probably tell I’ve started the school year again in earnest. If you are interested at all in education-related issues, check out my other blog called Making the Grade. I’ll make sure to post here but not as frequently as the past two weeks.

Upon arrival in London we quickly got a cab to our hotel, the Sheraton Grand Park Lane Hotel. It is right near Hyde Park and has direct access to a number of Tube lines that can get you anywhere in the city quite quickly. The hotel is a beautiful old building that is still undergoing some renovation but has amazing charm. The oddest thing to me was that the check-in counters were actually around the back of the hotel for some reason. We had booked this hotel using points and since we booked four nights we actually go the fifth night free. So, instead of 20,000 points/night (as shown below) it averaged to 16,000/night.

The room itself was small but had some nice amenities. The bed was super-duper comfortable! An interesting perk they added: a cell phone for use while in London. We didn’t need to because we had purchased SIM cards for ourselves at the airport, but it is a very interesting idea.

We had a small issue when we checked in because they said we did not have access to the Sheraton Club Lounge even though I knew it was a benefit of the Starwood Preferred Guest Business card that I had. After a brief twitter exchange with @spgassist our room was called and keys fixed to give us access.

It had a wonderful breakfast spread every day that we used to supplement lunch fixings as well.

We did a variety of activities while in London: from visiting the London Transport Museum, to watching buskers in Covent Garden, to exploring the State Rooms of Buckingham Palace, viewing the sky from the London Eye, seeing the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, to having afternoon tea at the Dorchester Hotel. London is a beautiful place to go visit and we will definitely return!