Summer 2026 Graduation Celebration: Edinburgh, London, Disneyland Paris, Paris - Day 6 London

A couple of days before arriving in London, I got an email from the theatre where we had tickets to see Phantom of the Opera that we needed to allocate extra time to get the theatre because there was a tube strike on. Lovely. The strike would run two days: June 2 and June 4. Thankfully, I had planned most of our June 2 activities close to our AirBnB, so it didn’t impact us too much, but it did cause us some headaches, unfortunately.

We awoke to a typically soggy London morning. We grabbed our umbrellas and walked over to Kensington Palace for our reserved-time tickets right at opening. There was already a pretty good sized line when we got there but we were in pretty quickly. Again, the included audio guide was quite good and we enjoyed our visit to the palace. Photos were allowed inside, but I didn't take many. I did find this wind clock thing to be intriguing.

We had originally planned to have lunch elsewhere, but it was too early and nothing was going to be open, so we had a really early lunch in the cafe at the palace, which was fine but not amazing (about like you would expect) but it got us moving along a little more quickly. We decided to take an Uber to the Science Museum. The Uber took forever because traffic was already insane due to the strike. We probably could have walked there more quickly, but saving our feet was a priority. We also seemed to get caught up in some kind of graduation traffic, which didn’t help anything. 

The Science Museum was actually super cool and it was nice to take a thematic break from the historical stuff we had been seeing (and would continue to see over these two weeks of travel). We had picked this museum because they had a Star Trek 60th Anniversary exhibition on with props and costumes from the various shows. It was cool the way they set it up because instead of having everything in one section, it was all scattered about and we had a pamphlet listing the location of each thing and it was like a little scavenger hunt so in the end we saw a good portion of the museum, which was nice. I highly recommend this museum if you’re ever in London and are tired of “yay, colonizers!” 

We left there and went basically across the street to the V&A Museum. First we stopped in their lovely cafe and had some coffees and treats and everything was really good. Not at all like you’d expect from a cafe at a museum. Then we set off to check out the fashion exhibitions in the museum. Or not. Because they were closed and were pretty much the main reason we went. But the lady at the information desk told me that the theatre section was great so we went there instead and it was actually really great. We also checked out a few other exhibitions: gold and silver, tapestries, and jewelry. We took a bus back to the flat, which took approximately forever because of traffic. It should have been a 20-30 minute trip and it was nearly an hour. 

We didn’t have as much time to get ready to see Phantom of the Opera because I wanted to leave very early given our experience getting back from the V&A. There were actually a couple of lines still running, but not the ones near us. It’s funny: I picked that AirBnB specifically because it was on the tube lines that would be most helpful for the things we wanted to do in our short time in London and then of course there’s a strike and those lines in particular weren’t running. So we hiked about 15 minutes over to a station where a line was running. We had no problems and got to dinner quite early, which is good because they said we really should have made a reservation. Oops. But we had great pizza and salad and made it over to the theatre just as doors were opening. We made some purchases at the merch table and found our seats: the Stalls, row F. Right where it would be perfect to experience the chandelier (IYKYK). 

Phantom of the Opera in its original theatre was an absolutely amazing. I got chills, I laughed, I cried. It was just so good. I cannot recommend it enough if you’re a Phantom fan. We had an understudy Christine and she was really amazing, but the current Christine is actually from Austin and was a kidsActing kid so it was a little bit of a bummer to not see her. After the show we had to take a bus home and it took, once again, absolutely forever, but was kind of fun to ride the top front row of a London double decker bus at night.