Weekly Walk: Wood Green to Regent's Park

This week's walk had a basic plan and it help up well. The plan was to walk through some parks in North London.

We started at Wood Green simply because it is far away and on the Piccadilly Line and so could get there early (by 10am) using our Oyster cards.

I used MapMyWalk this week despite my concerns about the way that it eats batteries so that I could get this map (right) of the route we eventually created from the basic plan.

The first green area was Alexandra Park and we went across the top of this admiring Alexandra Palace on one side and views across London on the other.

At some point we found ourselves on Parkland Walk, which was always a possibility, and sometime later we found ourselves off it, which helped with the decision we had on whether to leave it or not!

We had to skirt around one large green area shown on the map as this proved to be a golf course with no public right of way across it. We walked along the A1 instead.

Leaving the A1 we walked along The Bishops Avenue, which ia also known as "Billionaires' Row". If I was a billionaire I'd be very unhappy as about half the houses on the road are boarded up waiting for redevelopment. It all looks very tatty.

Hampstead Heath was even wetter that Highgate Wood but was full of dogs whereas the Wood was full of toddlers.

It took us two hours to get to the bottom of Hampstead Heath and that was time for a coffee. The place we were aiming for, a proper hipster joint, was closed to we went to the nearby and decidedly more traditional Polly's. It was excellent. I had the all-day veggie breakfast, as is my custom.

It was easy from there and the only remaining choice was where to have the celebratory beer and I chose The Albany by Great Portland Street. I had favourable memories of the place from, my phone informed me, 2013 and it was still decent, even if £6+ for a pint of Meantime is pushing it a bit.

The headline figures were 15.9 km walked in a fraction under 3 hours. That was a good walk.