London

 

   My friend and fellow Wannaskan Almanac writer, Kim Hruba, traveled to London recently with her husband Rosta to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. I was impressed with how much they crammed into a long weekend. They flew from Winnipeg which is a long flight. They ignored jet lag and did a couple of walking tours, did a brewery tour the next night, saw a play and whooped it up at an ABBA concert, and then made the long flight home. Amazing.

   Teresa and I spent fourteen days in England and Wales in early October, three of which were spent in London. We didn't let jet lag slow us down either, mainly because we landed at 6:30 a.m. and couldn't get into our hotel till three p.m. The hotel kindly let us leave our luggage there and we found an eight mile long canal that makes its way through London's back neighborhoods. Things that look simple on the map are confusing on the ground to sleep deprived brains. After some wandering, we found the canal. Our next goal was to find a canal side restaurant for breakfast. After an hour's R&R over breakfast we continued walking along the canal.

   There was a pleasant walkway along the canal which sometimes ended in an apartment building or a gated area where people lived on their barges. Then we had to find our way through a maze of streets until we found the canal again. One of these mazes contained an ancient church with an outdoor tea shop. It was the perfect place for some more R&R. After a couple of more miles Teresa realized she was wearing inappropriate shoes for walking. I urged her on a little further to a place called Camden Town. This had been an area of warehouses in the old days for provisioning the city. There had been stables for the horses that pulled the barges along the canal. Now the buildings are a warren of shops and food stands. I saw Three Locks Brewing and realized this was where Kim and Rosta had gone on their brewery tour. Small world.

   Camden Town was packed on a Monday morning. What must it be like on the weekend? Anyway, it was not a relaxing place for us to rest so we headed back towards our hotel. When we reached the place we had had breakfast, we stopped for lunch. It was a beautiful day so we ate outside and watched the world go by.

   Our hotel was next to the Paddington Train Station and after much wandering around the gigantic station, we located the ticket office and confirmed times for our short trip to Oxford next morning to start our five day walk along the Thames River. Our hotel room was now available. We got settled in, went out for supper, then resettled to wrestle with the half sleeping, half wakeful angel of jet lag.

My hero

   So we did our five day hike to the source of the Thames and our four day bus tour around Wales which I've described in previous Friday posts. As we rode back to London in the Wales tour bus, the driver had a couple of suggestions if we were going to be in London for a couple of days, which we were.

   When the tour bus dropped us off at Victoria Station, we took a classic London black cab to our hotel near Paddington Station, Our driver was from the Czech Republic, another connection with Kim and Rosta. We were at a different hotel now. For twenty pounds extra we got a room with more bells and whistles, including a heated bathroom floor. Woo-hoo, as Kim is fond of saying.

   Saturday morning we took the underground subway to the east side of the city for the first of our driver's free suggestions; a garden with great views atop a 15 story office building. When I saw the line for the elevator I tried to drag Teresa back to the street, but she said the line would go down quickly which it did, if 20 minutes is quick to you. It was worth the wait. On the rooftop were a series of geometric gardens and pools and great views of the city.

High Rise Downtown Gardens

   After checking rooftop garden off our list, we went to suggestion number two, the London Mithraeum which was a short walk from the rooftop garden. The Mithraeum is a reconstructed third century A.D. Roman temple in the basement of Bloomberg's European headquarters. Mithras was a Roman god about who nothing is known. They think Romans living in London attended his rites there to ensure prosperity. There are lots of artifacts displayed on the first floor and every half hour a new group of tourists is allowed down to the temple area for a light and sound immersive experience. Women were allowed down too even though it was men only back in the day.

   It was another lovely day in London as we crossed the bridge to the south bank and joined the throngs of tourists, foreign and domestic, who made their way through the great emporiums. Eventually we reached one of my bucket list items, the reconstructed Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare's plays had been performed before the original Globe burned down. There was a play going on when we arrived so we contented ourselves with a visit to the gift shop.

Lady Macbeth visited the Globe Theatre

   The big national museums in England are free and on Sunday we resolved to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum which was only a mile and a half walk from our hotel. Our walk would take us through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Cool. Except there was a half marathon going through the park that day and the stream of runners was not pausing to let us tourists into the park. But the clever marathon staff used a series of cattle fences to herd us across without interrupting the runners. You had to be there to see how it worked.

   The. Museum was great and we didn't feel guilty after staying less than two hours because we hadn't paid a hefty entry fee. We headed south from the museum looking for a place to have lunch but every place was packed. We planned to get an underground train to another area, but there was a line out of the station entrance and onto the street. Gridlock indeed. So we walked up to Covent Garden and watched the street performers for awhile, then walked to the Covent Garden underground station, but it was closed for maintenance, so we walked to the Tottenham Court Road station and saw the theatre where Mama Mia was playing. Kim had told me she was planning to see this play but according to her post, they saw Phantom of the Opera. Things change.

   We picked up our luggage at the hotel and took the train to a hotel next to Heathrow airport. I sleep better when I know I'm just a short bus ride from the airport. Things change in London and you don't want to be sitting in Paddington Station while your plane is calling for final boarding. On the other hand, being stranded in London would not be the worst thing in the world.