Saga 2025 Day 1: London – Police Station Hotel, British Museum, Dinner In Darkness & Abbey Road

To kick off our almost two week trip with friends, we picked them up from London Heathrow airport and drove into London for the night.

We’d visited London with them a couple of times before and had hit up most of the main attractions, so this time we had a few other things in mind.

Here’s what we got up to during the first 24 hours of our trip together.

Great Scotland Yard Hotel

The first fun thing was checking in at our hotel for the night. London’s Metropolitan Police Service has long been known as Scotland Yard, with its headquarters once being located on Great Scotland Yard Road. In a building that once housed the detective department, there’s now a hotel called the Great Scotland Yard Hotel.

The Great Scotland Yard Hotel is part of the Unbound Collection by Hyatt, so we booked a couple of rooms there using World of Hyatt points. I have Globalist status with Hyatt, so we received an upgrade to a room with a spacious balcony overlooking Great Scotland Yard Road.

The hotel has all kinds of fun design elements, from a speakeasy behind a bookcase design (which sadly wasn’t open the midweek night we were there)…

…to an exploding clock as you enter…

…to sniffer dogs on the elevator hand rails and more.

We only had the one night at this hotel and were out and about for much of our stay there, so we’d love to return to enjoy even more of the experience. Guests can also get a tour of the building from the concierge, so that’s something else on our wishlist as we didn’t have time during this stay.

Before heading out to dinner though, we did enjoy a quick drink on our balcony.

The British Musuem

During our last couple of trips to London, our friends had tried to visit the British Museum. The first time, they waited in line so long that they only had time to spend a couple of minutes in there. The second time, the museum required timed tickets which we hadn’t realized.

This time we were much better prepared. Once we had our general itinerary nailed down, we booked timed tickets for the museum at 3pm. That’d give us time to drive from Heathrow into London, check in at the hotel and then wander over to the British Museum as it was only a 20-25 minute walk away.

Other than on Friday evenings when it closes at 8:30pm, the museum closes at 5pm which gave us a couple of hours to explore. The museum is so big and has so many exhibits, you could easily spend a couple of full days there, but even a couple of hours gives you a chance to see a lot.

We’d done a little research ahead of time and so picked some key exhibits we wanted to see. One of those was the Rosetta Stone – a key part of history as it’s what enabled historians to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stone has three types of inscriptions on it – one set in hieroglyphs, another in Demotic script and a third in ancient Greek. It was the inclusion of the latter two that enabled historians to translate hieroglyphs both on the Rosetta Stone and hieroglyphs found elsewhere.

The museum has a very extensive area with Egyptian artefacts. In addition to the Rosetta Stone, there were statues from temples, several sarcophagi, mummies in coffins and more.

The museum has some interesting exhibits that were found at Sutton Hoo in England, the site of a ship burial from ~600 AD. One of the most notable artefacts is a helmet that’s still in remarkable condition.

Another fascinating exhibit was the Lewis Chessmen. Made of walrus ivory and whale teeth, these chess pieces date back to the 1100s and were found on the fairly remote Isle of Lewis in Scotland. It’s thought that the design of these chess pieces inspired the chess pieces that appeared in the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone movie.

Snacks From Amelia

While walking to the museum, we passed by a café/bakery that had some delicious-looking pastries. On our way back to the hotel, we decided to stop by to get a quick snack.

Raspberries are one of my favorite fruits, so I couldn’t resist one of their raspberry tarts loaded with them. Mark and Megan meanwhile got one of the blueberry tarts, as well as a lemon meringue tart. They were delicious, so well worth the price.

Dinner At Dans Le Noir

For dinner, Shae and I took Mark and Megan to a unique restaurant we’d had a chance to dine at in the past, but which would be an entirely new experience for them.

The restaurant is called Dans Le Noir which, if you know your French, translates to ‘In The Dark’. The concept behind the restaurant is that you dine in the dark. I don’t just mean that the lights are dimmed; instead, it’s pitch black inside. You can hold your hand right in front of your face and you won’t be able to see it move. The servers are all visually impaired too.

To ensure it stays dark, customers have to leave their phones, watches, etc. in a locker for the entirety of the meal. That means you can’t take a photo of your meal, although even if you could then it’d look something like this.

There’s a further twist with this. In addition to not being able to see your food as you eat, you don’t know what you’re eating either! You tell the restaurant ahead of time how many courses you want and if you have any dietary requirements (e.g. vegan, lactose intolerant, gluten-free, etc.), then you’re served mystery meals.

That’s a key part of the meal experience – you have to try to work out what it is that you’re eating. Some parts of it were somewhat easy to work out, such as knowing that the amuse bouche had mint in it, the appetizer had fish and there was asparagus in the main course. However, there was lots that we didn’t discern, such as the meat in the entrée being veal and it having a sunchoke/artichoke mash.

You aren’t left entirely, ahem, in the dark about what you’ve eaten. After finishing your meal, you’re shown photos and a description of each course.

Overall, it’s a great experience, both in terms of its uniqueness and the tastiness of the food.

***Spoiler Alert***

If you’d like to see what we ate, here’s the menu that was in force during our visit.

Abbey Road

The next morning we set off for Liverpool, but not before stopping by Abbey Road, home of the world famous recording studios and site of the iconic Beatles album cover with the four band members crossing the road.

With four of us in our group, we decided to try to recreate the image. We set up one of our phones on a tripod at this memorial as that seemed like it would give us the best angle.

It’s a fairly busy road, so we didn’t want to set up a timer and have to be in the right position at just the right time. Instead, we recorded a video in order to pull stills from it. I think the phone might’ve been set up a little far away, so the image quality when zoomed in wasn’t quite as good, but you can see what we were trying to do!

In true commitment to the bit, I kicked off my flip-flops to walk across barefoot in the rain seeing as Paul McCartney was barefoot on the album cover.

Afterwards, we walked past the Abbey Road studios…

…and stopped in at the Abbey Road Shop where they sell – as you might expect – all things Beatles and Abbey Road-related.

From there, it was on to Liverpool for more Beatles-related things.

Saga 2025 Trip To London, Liverpool & Scotland

Here are links to all of the posts in this series:

• Saga 2025: Trip With Friends To London, Liverpool & Scotland – An Intro
• Saga 2025 Day 1: London – Police Station Hotel, British Museum, Dinner In Darkness & Abbey Road