CITY & AWAY · LONDON

London, on My Own Terms

Five days. One carry-on. No group chat deciding where we were eating. My first solo London trip was less about proving I could do it and more about discovering how much I liked doing it my way.

I landed in London with a schedule that was ambitious even by my standards. Once I was actually there, the story became much simpler: I could wake up, change the plan, stay too long in a bookstore, skip something that no longer sounded fun and answer to absolutely no one.

The Tower Hotel was home base, which made the Tower of London and Tower Bridge an easy opening chapter. I had booked the London Eye and river cruise too, and London gave me exactly the cinematic city moments I wanted without requiring every hour to become content.

The shopping list was very me: Harrods, Selfridges, Ralph Lauren, King’s Cross Platform 9¾, Waterstones and book stops wherever I could fit them. Jellycat hunting became its own subplot. The pilot bear I wanted was out of stock at Harrods, so the hunt evolved instead of becoming a reason to overspend.

By the final day I had done Buckingham Palace and the Natural History Museum, made it to Oxford Street and King’s Road, stopped at Ralph Lauren and King’s Cross, and deliberately let Liberty go. A good itinerary is not a contract.

I was traveling on a real budget. I aimed for roughly $100 a day after the flight, hotel and major activities were already paid, and I had to decide what was actually worth bringing home. That made the trip better, not smaller.

The biggest surprise was how normal solo travel started to feel. There was no grand movie scene where London transformed me into a different person. I was still me, just in another country, making my own decisions. That turned out to be enough.

Would I do it again? I was thinking about the next trip before I was home.

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