A few weeks back my parents came down to visit! For many of you that wouldn’t be all that much of an event, but now they live on a Scottish Island I don’t get to see them all that much. I mean, I’m planning my next trip up to see them and I have to break it down to London – Glasgow (coach, train, sleeper service, plane, car, cannon) , Glasgow – Oban (train), Oban – Craignure (ferry), Craignure – Pennyghael (bus or pick up by parents). It means that if they are coming down you need to do more than just hang around and it likely means they’ll need a hotel. I’m apologising now for a very photo heavy post.

We decided to make a proper weekend of it as it was the first time they’ve made the trip since they moved up there. So we planned in a show (Les Mis, at last!) and then I organised for us to eat at a number of places which I knew they’d probably like. We started off with a trip to the British Museum, which has been high on my list since I moved down. I absolutely love a trip to a museum and when I was younger I was a little bit obsessed by ancient history. I should warn you now that the rest of the post is quite photo heavy as we had a pretty busy weekend.

Lunch was followed up by a trip to Bao’s permanent residence in Soho (again, at last!) and because we got there about 5-10 minutes before it opened, while we did have to queue, we were part of the first wave of people to be seated. I’m going to have to go back and get some proper snaps and do a real write up at some point, but all I’ll say here is that it surpassed my expectations and my parents were very pleasantly surprised and pleased with my choice. I think it made a nice change for them to have something like that which, while they are big on Asian food, is slightly outside of their usual choices. I highly recommend the Lamb Bao, but as I said, I’m fully intending to go back and do this place justice with better snaps and real notes.

Next up was Les Mis, which absolutely blew me away. I was expecting it to be good, but I’ve deliberately not read up too much on how they do the stage show. I really enjoyed it all and the performances were all strong. So I’m pleased to say I can no tick it off the list. We followed this up with a quick gin at Graffiti in Soho and some extra tasty Vietnamese food from Com Viet in Covent Garden. Again my pictures sucked here, so badly in fact that you’re not getting any.

The Sunday morning we popped to Caravan for Brunch. Again, we arrived there about 10 minutes before doors and a queue materialised about 5 minutes later. Within 20 minutes the whole place was full and had a buzz which didn’t lead us to believe it was a Sunday morning at 10am. Being rookies/having eyes bigger than our stomachs/assuming the portions would be smaller we each ordered a cheaper/”smaller” dish along with our main. My dad went for porridge, I went for avocado on toast and my mum went for fruit salad.

It turned out that each of these, despite their low cost, was giant and definitely not needed along with a more expensive main, but hey, I still ate it because breakfast food is the best food. As for our main courses, I opted for Baked Eggs (tomato pepper ragout, greek yoghurt, toast & merguez sausage) while my parents both went for the Caravan Fry (eggs, mushrooms, roast tomatoes, bacon and toast).

After another great meal we tried to work out what we could do that wouldn’t cost us too much and wouldn’t leave us rushing to get them to their train later in the day. We ended up popping to the Tate Britain, then getting a boat from Westminster down to Tower Bridge and having a coffee/cheesecake down in St Katherines Dock.