Trip Report: Day 5: London

We had another full day in London to check out the sights, so we set out to Westminster to see Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. We had considered going the day before, but it turned out to be both good and bad that we didn't - it was Commonwealth Day, so the Abbey was closed to visitors, but William and Kate and Harry were there! Maybe we could have caught a glimpse! Oh well.

When I went to Westminster Abbey with Becca in 1998 I remember it being much less organized - we just walked in and wandered around and took a million pictures. They've really locked the whole thing down now. There's a really great audio guide but also six million people. Still, it is so amazing to me to see THE VERY COFFIN in which Queen Elizabeth I's body is interred and I would pay the twenty pounds just for that probably at least five more times.

Then we walked across the Thames toward the London Eye. I remembered a secret back way so we took that, and stopped for lunch at another noodle shop on the way. There was free wi-fi so we sat for a while and took a nice break to stare at our phones.

The Eye is extremely touristy, but it was fun to do! And we didn't have to wait in line at all.

After the Eye we took the tube to go look at Dolphin Square, a massive apartment block where Grandma Betty lived when Mom was born in the early 50s. It's right on the river and is convenient to the Westminster area, so a popular place for diplomats to live.

There's a huge courtyard and gardens in the middle.

We talked with a resident who was hanging out on a bench in the gardens and he vaguely alluded to there being some kind of bad press recently. Later we discovered the alleged pedophilia ring involving MPs that has been in the news the last several years was supposedly based in Dolphin Square. He said it's a very nice place to live, though. Just a few bad apples!

We were pretty tired after all this walking so retired to the hotel for a rest, and then got dinner at what turned out to be a very atmospheric pub just down the street, The Champion. I ate some great fish & chips and found myself daydreaming about their sticky toffee pudding just yesterday. 

After that we went home for an early bedtime because the next morning we were headed to Paris!

Trip Report: Day 4: London

On Monday we set off for the Tower of London first thing. Tudor history is one of my favorite things and I have always wanted to visit the Tower but it didn't work out for various reasons the first two times I was in London. 

I had this bridge as my desktop photo in college!

Most of the Tower of London is very old. I took pictures of the first sign like this we saw, but then it turned out that almost every one of the towers was built in the 1100s.

So old! The Tower had already been there for 300 years when Henry VI died here!

This part in the center is the White Tower, which I've read about in a million Henry VIII books. Today it has a bunch of historical exhibits, including armor of the kings and their horses going back ~400 years.

  
You can also see the crown jewels at the Tower, which were suitably impressive. Part of the exhibit had a moving walkway like in an airport to keep everyone moving along past the cases of jewels. Such a good idea! Most of the crown's treasures were melted down when Oliver Cromwell overthrew the monarchy in the 1600s so unfortunately not too much stuff exists from before that time.

This sculpture marks the spot where Henry VIII's wives died on the scaffold, and a bunch of other people, too.

There is carved graffiti covering the walls inside the towers that were used as prisons.

And the tower most often used as a prison has a great view of the scaffold area, which doubtless was very comforting for people locked up awaiting their execution.

After we finished at the Tower of London, we found a Wagamama and had some noodles and Diet Coke. Then we walked up the hill to begin Rick Steves' East End walking tour, which included Jack the Ripper sites. This is the Ten Bells pub, where one of the victims worked, and Christ Church.

At the end of a little East End street you suddenly come to Brick Lane, the most heavily Bangladeshi area in London. It's very odd how this part of the city changes abruptly from skyscrapers to old tenements to ethnic neighborhoods.

See the hooks on the building? They are tenterhooks! That's where it comes from. Thanks, Rick Steves!

This is what most of the neighborhood looked like during the Jack the Ripper times, according to Rick. Ben pointed out that it looks like an old timey scholar is walking toward us in the photo, but it's just an elderly woman wearing a scarf.

We walked over to Liverpool Station and then took the tube to Mayfair...

...where we located the building in which my mom was born! Today it's a plastic surgery hospital. We went inside and mom talked to the receptionist, who said it used to be a more general hospital back in the day.

That evening we got burgers and went to see Motown: The Musical. I'm not so much a musicals person but this one has lots of good recognizable songs so I enjoyed it. The server at the theatre bar talked me into ordering an entire bottle of wine (it just made good economic sense) so that probably helped.

Trip Report: Day 3: Stonehenge & Bath

We wanted to see Stonehenge, so I did some research and discovered an organized bus trip seemed to be the best way to get there. I chose one that stopped at Bath on the way back for a little extra culture. 

Our bus was over half empty, which was great! We had plenty of room to spread out for the 90 minute trip to Stonehenge. Our tour guide was a Scottish lady who told us all sorts of interesting facts about Stonehenge, Bath, and England in general. She pronounced it StoneHENGE. The main extra fact I remember learning is that it's illegal to have a fire in the fireplace in London. They got rid of coal because it was so polluting but now you can't burn wood, either! This seems kind of barbaric. Anyway, here is Mom on the bus, waiting to pull out of Victoria Coach Station.

When we got to Stonehenge the lady said, "Everybody look out the window to take your first pictures!" I did a great job.

I got plenty of good ones once we were off the bus, though.

A couple people had told me Stonehenge was not that impressive in person but I don't know what they're talking about. It was exactly as impressive as I expected it to be. You can't walk into the circle, and there's a big enough perimeter around the whole thing that it feels as if there aren't many people around, either.

It really wasn't very crowded. Just a few other tour buses.

There were sheep hanging out casually all over the place.

One benefit of traveling with my mom is that she is a lot more amenable to letting me ask strangers to take our picture. We chose two different ones at Stonehenge (just in case!) and each of them chose a different approach.

We had just enough time at Stonehenge to wander around the site and grab a sandwich, and then we were off through the countryside to Bath.

We arrived shortly after the end of the Bath Half Marathon so there were approximately six thousand people wandering around all over the place. Our tour guide held up a pink umbrella so we could follow her through the crowds and led us on a brief walking tour of the main points of interest. Like this.

And obviously, the Roman baths. They are ancient but were only rediscovered and excavated in the 1700s.

Around this bath area are some of the original Roman lead pipes. Right there in the ground!

I took a bunch of infrastructure pictures because I knew Ben would be interested in this sort of thing.

After we saw the baths we wandered around for a couple hours on our own. Bath is pretty great. The architecture is very consistent throughout the city center.

The Bath Abbey is one of the few to survive Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries in the 1500s.

 

The other thing I really wanted to see is the Royal Crescent, mainly because the end of the Persuasipn adaptation I love the most is filmed right there on the corner. We learned that while the facade is consistent along the whole front of the building, everyone does whatever the want with the back of their properties.

We popped back on the bus around 4:00 and made it back to London by 6:30pm. I was really surprised at how much I loved the bus tour. It was so convenient and informative! I hope this isn't a symptom of aging.

We walked down the road from our hotel to an Italian place for dinner. There were a lot of good options in our area. I got a giant bowl of carbonara, which was the perfect thing after a long day of activities.

Trip Report: Days 1-2: London

Look, it's ANOTHER trip report! 9 days after we got back from Charleston, I abandoned Ben and Papaya and set out to Europe with my mom.

Traveling with my mom has a few pretty sweet benefits, because she's Diamond Platinum Elite 1000 Level or something with Delta. I hoped this would lead to a first class upgrade, but alas, they seem to be kind of stingy with those on international flights. We did get access to the Virgin Atlantic lounge for free both ways, though, which turned out to be extremely fancy. They told us to be at JFK three hours before the flight and it took about twenty minutes to get through security, so we had plenty of time to enjoy the amenities.

We had eaten breakfast at the hotel but got some additional food in the lounge, mainly because it was free.

Then we flew to London! We arrived in the evening, which turned out to be a million times better than the early morning arrival I've experienced on every other trip to Europe. We found a restaurant just down the street from our hotel that was still open at 10:00pm and had some dinner and wine, and then went back to the hotel and went to sleep. I took pictures of all the wine so I could look it up later. This one is apparently not available in the United States.

We stayed at the Doubletree Hyde Park, near Notting Hill Gate. (Second benefit of traveling with mom: all hotels were free through her Hilton Honors points!) This is the same neighborhood where Ben and I stayed a few years ago so I was sort of familiar with it and knew there were good tube connections nearby. Since our first morning there was the same day as the big market at Portobello Road, we went over to check it out.

We got over there fairly early but by 10:00 it was totally packed - very touristy but fun to see. We both bought small crossbody purses which turned out to be perfect for the rest of the trip, as they were very lightweight.



Oddly almost all the pictures I took are of food. POTATOES.

More food.

Here's a giant thing of paella!

Then we went back to the hotel to put on some fancier clothes, and headed into Kensington Gardens for high tea at The Orangery, which was built by Queen Anne as a conservatory in the early 1700s.

We got legitimate British Pimm's cups!

And the waiter offered to take our picture without us even asking for it.

Look at all this stuff! We had no trouble finishing it off.

Then we walked through Kensington Gardens and around the palace.

This is the famous gates where the memorials to Diana were, but see behind it where there's the wall with the guard station at the corner? THAT'S WHERE WILL AND KATE AND HARRY LIVE. They are really serious about you not taking pictures or anything in that area. I was hoping for a glimpse of Harry but alas, did not get one.

After going back to the hotel and changing back into jeans, for some reason we walked the entire way through the park from our hotel to Buckingham Palace.

And then down through St. James' Park to Trafalgar Square, and popped into the National Gallery for a snack and the National Portrait Gallery to look at a few pictures. Although we were already pretty tired, we then decided to set out on Rick Steves' historical walk of The City of London, which turned out to be insanely long and detailed. But we learned lots of things about London.

This is Somerset House, a big palace right on the Thames. Before we left I had just finished reading about the big palaces lining the Thames because one of them was mentioned on Downton Abbey recently! Most of them were torn down after World War I.

This is the Royal Courts of Justice, their highest civil court building.

This is Samuel Johnson's cat, Hodge. I am still not entirely clear on who Samuel Johnson is.

The walking tour went all the way past St. Paul's and to the Monument, but we didn't make it to the end because we ran out of time.

We met up at a very old and atmospheric pub called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese with my high school friend Fred and his husband Will. You may remember Fred from when we met up with him in Denmark. I had not seen him for nearly twenty years before September. I guess now Fred and I are going to be the type of friends who meet up for coffee and dinner in various European cities every six months. It was crazy packed and the service was terrible, but Fred assured me the service is terrible nearly everywhere in the UK. We enjoyed some beers and fish & chips and great conversation, and then we took the tube back to the hotel to rest our feet! We covered a lot of ground on our first day in London - I thought surely it would be the most walking we'd do the entire trip, but little did I know the death marches to come.