This is the fifteenth post in a series about my 2013 trip to Ireland, Scotland and Great Britain. Part of the free plane tickets were funded by the 40,000 point sign up bonus of the Chase Sapphire Preferred card.
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 1 – How I am taking my Dad to Ireland, Scotland, and Wimbledon in London in Business Class for $137!
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 2 – Planning for Hotels in Europe for Maximum Miles
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 3 – The Orlando Star Alliance Gold Lounge and the first change of plans
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 4 – Layover in New York City
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 5 – The JFK Lufthansa Lounge
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 6 – Brussels Airlines JFK-BRU in their new Business Class
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 7 – 13 Hours in Brussels
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 8 – Two Days in Dublin
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 9 – Waterford, Kilkenny, the Butler Castle, and a bit of Blarney
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 10 – Ring of Kerry and Dingle Peninsula
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 11 – Galway and the Cliffs of Moher
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 12 – Belfast, the Ferry to Scotland and Train Travel
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 13 – Playing the St. Andrews Old Course, Aberdeen and the Drambuie Incident.
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 14 – Searching for the Loch Ness Monster, Eilean Donan Castle, and Turnberry Golf Course
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 15 – London and Wimbledon
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 16 – 22 Hours in Frankfurt
- Eurotrip 2013: Part 17 – Lufthansa Business AND New First Class FRA-AID on Boeing 747-800
After two hectic weeks, we had finally made it to London, our final stop for the trip. Originally we had planned to take the train in so I had booked the Hilton in Paddington Station for our first night. It was nice and I took advantage of several promotions you can read about in Eurotrip 2013: Part 2 – Planning for Hotels in Europe for Maximum Miles. With my gold status we received free breakfast which was nice. We decided to take in some culture the next day and visit the museum of natural history.
It was pretty cool with a giant dinosaur fossil in the grand foyer.
We just stayed the one night at the Hilton and then moved to a hotel a little closer to Wimbledon. Since the rates were through the roof, I decided to use 88,000 of my Club Carlson points to secure two nights in a 328 GBP room at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt. This gave me a value of 1.2 center per point which isn’t bad for Club Carlson. I actually had bought 70,000 Club Carlson points during their flash sale for $280 so I ended up getting almost $1050 in rooms for $280 + 14,000 points. This gave me a value of 5.5 cents per mile for the miles I actually used from my account which is pretty incredible. The hotel was very nice but the rooms were quite small which I guess is standard in London. I was certainly glad I wasn’t paying cash for the room when I saw it! The next day we went to London on the Debenture tickets my Dad had arranged before our trip. There were 20+ courts of action and some of them you could get quite close!
We of course had to get our Pimm’s and Strawberries and Cream. They also had a champagne bar of course! 🙂
We watched the Ladies quarterfinal match between Radwanska and Li.
It was quite busy that day.
We also found out that it is possible to queue for tickets in the morning that you can get for ~60ish GBP so we decided to come back the next day and see if we could get in for the Men’s quarterfinals. We were able to walk right in and saw the Men’s quarterfinals match between Djokovic and Berdych.
After this we wandered around the grounds a bit and took in the scenery.
We also saw a pretty incredible match took place with the local hero Andy Murray coming back to win after being down two sets. It was packed in the arena but everyone gathered on the Henman Hill to watch it.
It was quite a scene and a great way to finish off our Wimbledon experience. We moved to a Marriott by the Heathrow Airport for out last night since our flight left earliesh the next day. I used another 9000 British Airways miles to get back to Dublin where we picked up our previous itinerary on Lufthansa. Next stop, Frankfurt!