The last full fay of our London adventure this time around resulted in the five of us breaking into three parties. Shelby went to Greenwich to see the Fan Museum and explore Greenwich itself, while Neuf and Brianna went to Buckingham Palace to (somewhat) see the changing of the guard – it was crowded, so they did not see very well. They visited some stores as well. All three of them met up early in the afternoon at St. Paul’s, where we were all to rendezvous at 3:15.

Meanwhile, to help make up for the lack of supper last night, I took Meredith to a breakfast buffet. With a view. Darwin’s is a restaurant that is part of the Sky Garden, which is a real garden at the top of the 20 Fenchurch Street building (nicknamed “The Walkie Talkie). The garden is on the thirty-seventhish floor (depending on if you are using the American or British floor numbering system), and the restaurant looks right down on the Thames, with great views of Tower Bridge.

Normally, I can’t stand heights. But I thought I would try it this time, since I knew Mer would love it. It turned out to be great – we were in a restaurant, sitting at a window, which overlooked a larger lounge space about two stories below.  Though the glassed-in lounge space had an outdoor terrace, the terrace wasn’t directly below us.  So I was quite removed from the edge and could not see straight down. The food was expensive – about thirty to thirty-five dollars each for the buffet – but the service was top-notch, the food was excellent, and it was serving as two meals for us. Since it costs even more than that to go up to the observation deck of London’s highest building (the Shard), getting to sit for an hour while eating excellent food was a solid deal.

After brunch, we wandered around the garden, which is free to the public with reservations made online. Since the reservations limit the number of people allowed up at one time, the garden did not feel overcrowded, and the layout allowed us to look out in all directions. Mer wanted to try the terrace, and I tried it, but had to beat a hasty retreat from the height. It was a slow-paced and pleasant morning.

We regrouped at the apartment and then headed out to the St. Paul’s area. We wanted to explore St. Bartholomew the Great, a church of which we had seen the exterior during the walk the other night. It is London’s oldest church, from about 1145. We had a little trouble finding it since I was relying on memory of the walk and on maps in my head, but we did get there eventually. The church was almost empty, and we got to walk around it at our own pace. There were several modern religious artworks installed next to inscriptions from 1600, and they were moving – there was a modern statue of St. Bart holding his own skin (he was flayed alive), an abstract but identifiable crucifixion, a modern painting take on Mary and Jesus, an excellent terra cotta statue of Jesus coming out of an old stone coffin for his resurrection, and some glass work. The church has been the site of several movies, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Richard II, and even, so we were told, a scene from one of the Transformer movies.

We left St. Bart’s to get back to St. Paul’s, stopping briefly at a park that had been planted where a Wren-designed church used to be. It had been bombed out during World War II, and the altar wall still survives, along with some window casings down the sides. The interior of the church has been planted with plants in a way to show where the pews used to be. It is a lovely use of the space.

We had lunch just outside of St. Paul’s, and then we met the others there at 3:15, so we could start our trek out to the Warner Brothers Studio just outside of London, to go see the Harry Potter Studio Tour. It took a good two hours to get there from St. Paul’s, party because we happened to take a train that stopped frequently. But get there we did, and it was pretty amazing.

Warner Brothers has dedicated two former studio buildings to provide  permanent housing for props and costumes and sets from all eight of the Harry Potter movies. They have exhibits on how things were designed, and full sets of rooms, such as Dumbledore’s office and Harry’s bedroom at Hogwarts. These are the actual sets that were used in the films. We got to hear, from the people who actually made things, about how sets were constructed, or how special effects were done. To my great surprise, the effects people preferred to use real props as much as possible, resorting to computer-generated effects only as cost or safety demanded. Even then, they usually tried to have some real props as a base from which to start, so, for example, Harry might be fighting a snake with a real prop head and a computer body. It was great fun to get to see how they did it.

By sheer luck, we were there on the first day of the preview opening of the Gringott’s Bank set – the staff themselves only saw it for the first time last night. It was the entire Gringott’s lobby, in full scale – huge. It was pretty jaw-dropping. They also had behind-the-scenes looks at how the vaults were made for the films – again, a mixture of real props and computer animation.

The exhibit had a full-sized section of Diagon Alley, and a near-full-sized Platform 9 3/4, with the Hogwart’s Express sitting in it. The winner of the tour was saved for last, with an incredibly detailed scale model of Hogwarts itself – it must have been fifty feet across, and had several levels and included lots of landscaping. It is hard to do it justice from description, but it was a real “Whoa!” moment.

We took the faster train back to the city, and so our touring for this trip ends. Tomorrow we get launched at 7:00 am (3:00 am EST), and should get home sometime around 9:00 pm if all goes well. We have had a wonderful time with great weather and good success at seeing lots of things.

Shelby decided to do her own thing today, but the rest of us got a leisurely start to the day, eating breakfast at Covent Garden before heading to Paddington Station, from which we took the one-hour train ride to Oxford, home to the oldest university in England. Meredith had lived a summer there with her parents when she was seven (almost forty years ago), and had not been back since a brief visit when she was fourteen and on a tour that stopped in Oxford for a couple hours. The other three of us had never been, so it seemed like a great getaway from the bustle of London. And so it was.

We got there about noon and walked about a mile from the train station to the university area. The university is broken up into thirty-eight separate colleges, and we were hoping to see the ones with which the authors C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll were associated. Since that represents three different colleges, that was an ambitious plan. We got to Carroll’s college, Christchurch, which is tourable by the public, but for some reason, the main hall was closed until 2:30, so we kept walking along a small river (the Cherwell) to the local botanic gardens.

I like botanic gardens, and it was a beautiful day, so we paid the reasonable six pounds and spent a happy hour there, wandering around and looking at flowers and trees. We were probably about two or three weeks early for maximum early blooms, but it was a soothing place, even with many small school children running around near the entrance. We found that Carroll used to walk with the young Alice in the gardens, so we even had our Carroll tie-in.

We then decided we should get lunch, and the plan for that was another mile walk across town to the pub favored by Lewis, Tolkien, and the other Inklings – The Eagle and Child. Once we were most of the way there, I discovered I had left my glasses back in the gardens (I was wearing my sunglasses), so I walked back by myself to get them. I met the others near the pub; they had been window shopping, so had not yet reached it.

The front section of The Eagle and Child is crammed with nooks and is interesting and inviting. As such, there were no tables there. The back half is more modern – not bad, but not so interesting. We sat there and had an unhurried lunch. Meredith had been denied admission to the pub thirty-nine years ago, for being too young, so the lunch date had been postponed for some time.

What to do after lunch? When you don’t know what to do, punt. We walked a mile back across town, to the River Cherwell, where we rented a punt – a shallow boat that is propelled by a pole by someone (me) standing in the back of the boat. I had seen it on TV, and was reassured by the man collecting the money that it was very easy. It was not, at least not for the first fifteen minutes, during which time I ran into a bridge support and the shore, had to have a boat coming at me go around me because I could not get on the correct side, and got so close to a footbridge I had to stop the punt by reaching up with my hand and grabbing the bridge. I also almost fell in four times. Happily, I more or less got the hang of it for the final forty-five minutes, which was good, since that was a much busier section of river, which included three not-well-controlled punters and a very erratic rowboat using the novel method of rowing with the prow facing the wrong direction. Overall, the punting was a good experience, and the others said they liked it, but I was tired and my feet were sore, so I was happy to be back on land, dry.

As we walked back along the street, we saw that Magdalen College was open, so we paid for admission there. It was quite lovely. It was very quiet and had a wonderful path along some wooded areas near the river. The flowers were out back there too, and it was peaceful. We had to be back through the main gate to the college by 6:00 or risk getting locked out in the paths, so we made sure not to be out too long, but we got to walk around the quads of the college, and spent some time watching the deer in the deer paddock, because what is a college without its own deer population?

We stopped at a coffee and pastry shop after I was seduced by the display in the window. That worked out okay since we then walked back to the train, took the train back to Paddington, and took the Tube home. We got back to the apartment around 9:00, so the pastries inadvertently turned out to be supper.

As for Shelby, she made the most of the day, going to Westminster Abbey (and stumbling into an anti-Brexit rally), the Foundling Museum, the Sir John Soanes Museum (it was open this time), and riding the London Eye. And she still beat us home.

Today was the first day I planned; years ago Meredith decided I needed to plan half the vacation days rather than letting her plan them all and then making tons of suggestions when we got to the country. That is fair, but it is more pressure when others are involved. I played it really safe today – we just went to the Tower of London.

In my mind, the Tower is the one must-see sight in London. You have a cool castle, a thousand years of history, and the super-cool Tower Bridge in the background of many pictures. There are the crown jewels, and Beefeater guides in costumes, and semi-tame ravens wandering around. There is prisoner graffiti that is four hundred years old and escape stories and Isaac Newton as the head of the English Mint at the Tower. It is an amazing place.

We showed up when it opened at 9:00, having purchased tickets the night before. We stayed until almost 3:00, so it seems as if the others enjoyed it. We started with seeing the crown jewels, since that can get long lines. We waltzed right in to them and got to pass them (on moving walkways) three times. I had forgotten how impressive they are – covered in diamonds and other valuable stones, they do convey a certain awe, even to this skeptical American.

From there, we took a forty-five-minute tour from a Beefeater (warder) – one of the people who served in the military for twenty-five years or more and then applied for the position. Our guide was a funny man who managed to be cranky-seeming while still being polite. My favorite line was when he told Americans “to go study your history. That won’t take long.” He was great. He filled us in on the development of the Tower, from the original White Tower from around 1100 to its use as a royal residence and a prison and a barracks (not all at the same time).

We then saw the rest of the Tower (more or less) over the next several hours. There are exhibits on animals kept at the Tower (they rarely fared well), the armor and weapons of the keep, the Royal Mint (which was at the Tower until 1811), retired crowns and jewels, and more. We finished our visit to the Tower by crossing over the famous Tower Bridge, going out along it and coming back over.

At that point, Shelby headed off on her own to explore the St. Paul’s Cathedral area, to see the Museum of London (mixed reviews), and to see the British Library (positive reviews). The other four of us returned to the apartment. I took a nap, and Brianna rested in her bedroom, and Meredith and Neuf went up to Covent Garden for awhile before we all headed out to St. Paul’s at 5:30.

We grabbed a quick supper across from the cathedral, and then we met up with a local guide, Andrew, who was to take us on a two-hour walk of the original City of London (about one square mile), with a focus on Shakespeare and Dickens. The City itself is mostly banks, and so while 350,000 people work there, only about 7,000 live in the district, which makes it very quiet at night. Andrew walked us around, showing us places that Dickens describes in his stories, and pointing out where Shakespeare lived when he came to London, as well as a few memorials to Shakespeare. It was a relaxing way to see the city, and along the way, we saw a few houses and churches that date from Shakespeare’s time or earlier, along with some memorials to the religious upheaval of the time in which Shakespeare lived. Andrew even suggested that Macbeth might be inspired by the Catholic/Protestant issues of the day, with a Scottish king (James) on the throne and with other hints (like the castle porter’s speech about a farmer and equivocator being found in hell – both could be a reference to a well-known Jesuit priest executed around 1606). I loved the tour, and the others were still speaking to me at the end, so that seemed positive.

We walked down the hill from St. Paul’s to get the magnificent view of the church lit up at night, and then grabbed the Tube back to the apartment from near the river. After a day spent in the 1100s, the 1600s, and the 1800s, it was nice to ride back home.

Sometimes on these city trips, we stretch the city out. In this case, we stretched it by a ninety-plus-minute bus ride to go see some rocks. It’s amazing what people will pay to see.

All of us got up early and were on a bus, heading west at 8:30 am, going to see Stonehenge. A not-insignificant part of the trip was in just getting out of London to the highway. London is huge. The countryside out to the stones is very pretty in a non-dramatic way, with lots of fields and pastures. The bus drove right by the monument, so my first sight of the place was through a bus window. I had not realized how big the stones were. We zoomed on by, to the visitor center, getting off the bus about 10:30 with strict orders to be back by 12:30. The stone circle is a little over a mile from the parking lot, and there is a shuttlebus, but Mer and Brianna and I decided to walk on such a beautiful morning. In the interest of time, we did take the bus back, but the walk out was soothing. Shelby and Neuf took the bus out, so they were there for some time before we showed up.

I had not realized that the area around Stonehenge is full of burial mounds – hundreds of them within just a few miles of the stones. The stones were added roughly five thousand years ago to an area that seems to have been important from before that time (there are some mile-long dug trenches still visible that predate the stones being erected). Stonehenge is also the only existing stone circle that has stones on top, called lintels. Many of the stones are over ten tons, and they were all hauled from at least several miles away, with some seeming to have come all the way from Wales. A lot of people put a lot of effort into the construction, and no one really knows why. The stones do line up with the sun on the winter and summer solstices, but we do not know if that was the main function, as a sort of calendar.

Anyway, it is very impressive and worth seeing, even with a nearly four-hour drive round trip. You can’t get into the stone circle, but you do get to walk all the way around it, and you can get quite close on one side. There were a ton of people around, but the site is so large that you can get alone pretty easily. In fact, if we had been there with a car, I could have easily spent another three hours wandering around the burial mounds and checking out all of the visitor center. As it was, two hours pretty much covered the walk out to the monument, the actual visit, and the shuttle back to the tour bus. We got there with about five minutes to spare.

When we got back to London, Mer wanted to get a quick bite to eat an an Italian restaurant and then head over to the Docklands area of London to do a walking tour out of her guide book. Brianna, Neuf, and Shelby decided to go see a small museum and poke around some shops in that area instead. That worked for us – the Docklands is not high on the list of what to see in London for most people, but we stayed out there back in 2009 when we first visited London as a couple, and we wanted to go check it out again, and more thoroughly.

The Docklands used to be the world’s busiest port, but it got bombed out in World War Two, and then never recovered as the shipping industry went to container ships which could not come this far up the Thames. The area became one of the poorest in all of London, and was largely abandoned until the 1980s, when developers figured out it was cheap land. Now it is all gleaming glass and steel and parks and fountains, and is home to most of the high-tech office workers and banks in London. It has a very “city of the future” feel to it, which we had remembered from our 2009 stay.

What was new to us on this trip was getting into the small but well-planned parks. The designers put the shopping areas underground, and then put parks on top of them with fountains, flowers, and green spaces. They are great parks – small, but inviting. It must be working – we saw real estate advertised, and a 517-square-foot one-bedroom apartment was listed for the equivalent of about $600,000. I have no idea who lives in these places. Not teachers.

We enjoyed our walk around, and then took a fast boat back up the Thames to the Embankment dock. As such, we got to sail past all of the Docklands and see the new apartments on the river, and then go under Tower Bridge and past the Tower of London. We zipped past St. Paul’s, and all the way back to near our home for the week, where we stopped in and got reorganized before heading to Chinatown for supper and then ice cream for dessert.

I don’t usually try to eavesdrop, but the Chinese place had communal tables, and the man and woman next to me were talking though the whole meal. The man got to telling the woman many of the major stories of the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament), and he did an excellent job. I have no idea why he was so familiar with them, and I did not know how to ask, since we had not spoken to each other during supper. Then, in the ice cream store, two men came in, and one was talking in a British accent about the New England Patriots and one of their players. It was a little surreal.

It was a fine evening, so Mer and I walked back home, getting slightly lost several times, which resulted in wandering into different parts of Chinatown three different times. All part of the fun. We made it back home eventually. The others are not home yet, so I do not know how their afternoon and evening went. More eventfully than ours, it seems. I’ll update when I know more.

….

The others rolled in about 10:00 pm last night, and had a great time exploring most of London, it seems, although they had a few slight frustrations. They started their time together by visiting the Sir John Soane Museum, which is the home and collection of a major architect from the late 1700’s and and early 1800’s.  It turns out it is closed on Tuesdays. They visited a Victorian custom umbrella shop nearby, and they rode London’s double-decker buses several times.They got in a visit to Herod’s, which they said was high-end and a really quirky building. They went to Hyde Park to see the Peter Pan statue (under restoration and fenced off) and the Princess Di memorial fountain (empty of water).  After the sunset, somehow they got on the back side of Kensington Palace and had great views through the lit windows into the rooms and ended up in an area where people were swiping cards to get out of the grounds; they were allowed out. They finally looked for two different London restaurants, which were closed (one was new and not open at all yet), and so finally out of fatigue and hunger ate at the nearby Pizza Hut and then came home. They had a busy afternoon – we left each other only at 2:30. We clearly need another week here so they can see all of London, because I think they would.

It is mostly a great thing to be in a country where you speak the local language. It makes touring much easier. Since it makes touring much easier, it means people can strike off on their own, which Mer and I encourage. But it does mean that people have different experiences. Such it was today. Neuf and Shelby were already gone by the time Mer and I went upstairs to go around 9:00. Brianna decided to hang with us today.

Not only did Neuf and Shelby head off on their own, but they also did not stick together for long, each going to see different things. They started together at Buckingham Palace, but then Neuf had a ticket to tour Westminster Abbey. So their days looked like:

Neuf: Neuf went from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, then back to the palace. She caught Platform 9 3/4 (of Harry Potter fame) at King’s Cross Station before heading over to the British Library. She then texted and joined Shelby at the British Museum.

Shelby: Shelby started at the palace with Neuf, then toured the Queen’s Collection – an art exhibit focusing on royal portraits of Russian and British families. She then spent the rest of the day in the British Museum, where she managed to get to every single room in the entire museum, which is really impressive. Neuf joined her toward the end of the day.

That left me and Meredith and Brianna. We headed back to Covent Garden to get breakfast. We took a detour into St. Paul’s church (not cathedral). We had intended to walk through it to get to the market area, but the gates to the main square were closed. So we were stuck in the church and churchyard, which was not a bad thing at all. The churchyard had a striking statue of the conversion of St. Paul done around 2010, with Paul looking very young and very Roman. It worked, with the sculptor catching the instant by having the horse rear and Paul fling his arm up over his eyes – it was all quite dynamic. On the far side of the church was a small brick maze that led to a portrait of the queen, so I did the maze path for fun.

St. Paul’s is known as “the actor’s church,” and the inside is filled with dedications and memorials to actors. To drive home the point, the first sign we saw inside the lobby of the church was a directional sign to Hamlet auditions. We had not prepared a monologue, so we just went into the church, which is simple and elegant inside.

After a picture stop outside the church and one of Meredith posing with a flower cart (since she is teaching Pygmalion right now at school, which takes place here), we made it to the market. Our first-choice place was closed, but we had a good breakfast in a cute restaurant across the way.

After breakfast, we jumped on the Tube, the London subway, and took it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. I knew nothing about the museum, other than that Mer had said it was eclectic. I thought it would be a small museum filled with some decorative art. Um. No. It was a ginormous huge big museum, filled with pretty much anything that had any tie-in to a decoration. They have sculptures and silver and gold and paintings and fabrics and glass and architectural models and costumes and tapestries. They have Roman things, and early Christian objects, and Islamic and Buddhist art. They have some Donatello works, and Turner and Michelangelo and Rodin. It is an incredible museum. We ended up being there until 5:00 pm.

We walked in from the Tube – the museum has its own Tube tunnel access, and we walked into one of the sculpture galleries, where I was greeted by over a dozen Rodin statues. Welcome to the Victoria and Albert Museum! We caught a free guided tour that walked us through several of the most important Medieval and Renaissance works, which mostly focused on religious objects. We got to see a sculpture of Samson killing a Philistine; it was special for only having a few contact points on the ground. We saw a few works of Mary and Jesus and saw how the style changed over the years. The tour included a couple of ornate saint bone boxes (reliquaries), including one that had been associated with St. Thomas Becket (an English bishop murdered by four knights who thought they were doing the king a favor).

After the tour, we ran into a docent who recommended a half dozen rooms to go see, including architecture, glass, sacred silver and stained glass, household and decorative silver, and the theater and performance rooms. We also saw some other rooms, like paintings, along the way.

Of what we saw, I liked the sculpture, of course, but I also loved the theater rooms. They had costumes from The Lion King musical, and a First Folio of Shakespeare. They had the original horse puppet from The War Horse, which is a show I love. There was a Fred Astaire tux and stage designs for some famous productions and more. I don’t think I had ever seen anything like it before.

Even where we had lunch was spectacular – the cafe is decorated by heavy floral wallpaper designed by a famous designer, William Morris. We had dessert sitting in a sunny enclosed square, looking at a shallow splashing pool (although no one was in it today, since it was only about fifty-five degrees out).

One of the reasons we do this colleagues-included trips is so we can get to know our fellow teachers better. Mer and I both knew that Brianna was a fun person to be around, but we had not gotten to spend a ton of time with her. Today at the museum, the tour guide was introducing a glass cup and asked if anyone in the group of about twenty people believed in fairies. Brianna’s hand shot up as she said, “I do!” That was delightful. We knew she was a cool chick. Oh – the cup was supposed to have been left behind by a king of the fairies and had been passed along in one family for hundreds of years until the museum bought it.

We left the museum about 5:00 and went back to near Covent Gardens, to do a Rick Steves guidebook walk of the Gardens area that led over to Soho and Piccadilly Circus. When we got near the market area, I saw a souvenir shop and asked if I could go in it. Shelby had been looking for a specific souvenir, so I thought I would scout it out for her. Great minds think alike, because she and Neuf were already in the shop. And so we were reunited. They and we had also noted the same pub – The White Lion – earlier in the day and considered it a potential candidate for our dinner location, so we decided to eat there. After dinner, Shelby and Neuf went home, and the three of us finished up the walk. Soho does feel very bohemian, with lots of music shops and small streets, and Piccadilly Circus feels like Times Square had a love child with a quiet Paris neighborhood – garish lit-up signs reflected in the glass and stone fronts of elegant buildings. It is the heart of the theater district, so we saw lots of shows advertised.

Tomorrow is an early day, as we’re all heading out together to go tour Stonehenge. After that, who knows where our London fancies will take all of us?

We met a British man on the street tonight who is retired and walks around downtown with the purpose of being useful. He freely helped us find a gelato place, including walking with us and chatting the whole way. He really did just want to be friendly and welcome us to his city. When he found out we were American, he said he hoped we realized how lucky we are. True words.

I am lucky. Meredith and I have the means and the freedom to travel, and we both enjoy it. Most relevantly, we both have the health to travel. One of our good friends who was supposed to join us on this trip could not make it because of health reasons, and I almost was in the same metaphorical sickbed.

On Thursday, I started having an occasional dry cough and my eyes were stinging, which I wrote off to being tired. That continued on Friday, and I did not think about it much. I began to get worried on the walk home – I got so cold my teeth started chattering; it was cold, but not teeth-chattering cold (it was about thirty degrees). I could not get warm at home unless I was in bed under a ton of blankets. That kept getting worse, and I went to bed around 8:00 in hopes of getting well overnight. We were supposed to leave for the airport and then to London at 10:00 am, so I was not optimistic. Everything pointed to the flu, and that usually lasts at least a full day. By the time I got into bed, even the act of rolling over caused pain in my sore muscles, and I was cold if anything other than my head stuck out of the blankets. I warned Meredith that I would have to play London by ear, and maybe I could pay the change-ticket fee and join her later in the week.

My hopes were not raised when I woke up at 1:00 am and struggled to get out of bed and got to the refrigerator to get a Gatorade in an attempt to stay hydrated. By 3:00, I got up and took an Advil, hoping it would lower the fever I now had and the sore back that was keeping me from sleeping. London was dimming in a haze of flu symptoms.

When the alarm went off at 7:30 am, I was surprised at how much better I felt. I was clearly not one hundred percent, but I could move without pain and did not feel feverish. I proceeded to get ready for our trip, and I kept feeling better a little at a time. So, in the end, I made it to Toronto and on to London with Meredith and three other friends – Meredith N., Shelby, and Brianna. I do not know if I was healed by God having mercy on me or not – I know several people were praying for me, but many of us have been praying for other people who are seriously sick at school, and it is hard to see why a flu would be healed when other illnesses linger for people. I do know one thing, reinforced by our new British friend – I am lucky, and I need to be thankful. I am thankful to be with Meredith and we are both healthy enough to rack up eleven miles of walking on our first (partial) day of touring in London. Thank you, Lord.

The trip here was uneventful, and I was actually tired enough to get about three hours of fitful on-and-off sleep on the plane. Meredith, of course, just graded the whole flight. We got to our Air BnB in the middle-of-everything London (just a few blocks from Parliament and Trafalgar Square) around noon, but we could not check in before 3:00. We were able to drop our bags, and we headed back out, walking up to Covent Garden to the enclosed market there. While we were scoping out eating options, we were offered a free tasting of hot chocolate (which made my day) and got to listen to a lively string sextet (including a cellist who held her cello neck between her shoulder and neck). That was delightful. We then split up, as Meredith and I wanted to go get a picture of Meredith in front of St. Paul’s church (not cathedral), where My Fair Lady/Pygmalion is set, and then we planned on going on to Chinatown for lunch. The others wanted to stay in the area and do some shopping and sightseeing.

When we got to the church (a walk of about three hundred feet), there was a street entertainer there balancing on a round can and leading up to juggling knives. We stayed to watch, especially since he was right in front of the church. He was fun to watch and had good crowd engagement. We then got the picture of Meredith and walked up to Chinatown, which brought us through really lively and busy streets. It was a nice day, and Londoners seemed to be enjoying it. Unfortunately, the restaurant for which we were aiming was small, with only about a dozen tables, and all of them were full. We ended up going to the French bakery chain Paul, which was fine for our jet-lagged bodies.

Mer then walked us over to the bridge in front of Parliament, and we walked the area following a recommended walk from Mer’s Rick Steves guide book. We only got about halfway through it before seeing it was time to check in at the apartment, so we headed back. We bumped into the other three coming from the apartment, and they said the cleaners needed thirty more minutes. That was unfortunate, but we went to a park and ate some cookies that Meredith N. (“Neuf”) offered us. The others walked to the Thames while we ate, and then I wanted to see the pedestrian bridge across the river that followed the train line into Charing Cross train station. We ran into the others there. By then, we were able to head back and get into the apartment for a nap.

Or so I thought. Neuf and Shelby went back out for an English tea back at Covent Garden. They said it was wonderful. Meredith and I and Brianna all enjoyed a two-hour nap, and then I felt better after a shower.

The evening was mellow – we finished the Parliament-area walk and had supper in a pub along the way. The walk ended in Trafalgar Square, and while we were looking in our guidebook, our very nice British man introduced himself, ending our evening with kindness and gelato.

I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep to see if I can continue to feel better, but even if I feel a little worse, I would be sick in London, and that would still be something for which to be grateful.