THE HOP ON/HOP OFF BUS

We first discovered the Hop On/Hop Off Bus when we were in London. After taking the Underground, subway, for a few days we tried the HO/HO.

We boarded the bus by our hotel in Kensington and could get off at any stop like Buckingham Palace. We could then, as it's name implied, reboard any of the HO/HO buses that stopped at any of the twenty five, or so, stops on a route which is on a map that they, HO/HO supply. A set of earplugs is issued on boarding which you plug into a box on the bus and a narrative, sometimes live and sometimes canned,  is supplied.

You can sit on the bus all day long, if you prefer, and ride the thing round and around town.

We next tried the Hop On/Hop Off bus in Rome on several trips there and it was pretty much the same experience, big red double decker open top bus with the same layout. In London channel number one on the little box for the earbuds was in English and I didn't pay any attention to what languages were on the other eight channels. In Rome and Florence English was on channel number two. Italian was naturally the first channel.

We utilized the HO/HO bus again in Chicago, New York City and again in Washington DC today. Same setup except the busses here in the USA are brown instead of red.

We take a full, complete ride around the full course on the first day to get the lay of the land, so to say. This allows us to figure what we want to see and what we don't. New York had four different so called loops. Downtown and Uptown which we took and Harlem and Brooklyn which we didn't take. In DC, they have three loops. The red which was the most comprehensive the blue which we also took and the yellow which we skipped.

We bought  a two day pass so tomorrow we will go back and hop on the bus which stops near our hotel and see what we missed today and still want to see.