The wife and I recently came back from a trip to the United Kingdom that we had been planning for the last few years as part of our 25th wedding celebration. Our actual anniversary is not until October, but due to weather and schedules a summer trip worked out best. We were there for 12 days and had a terrific time. This post, and the ones that follow, are (hopefully) not going to be a detailed travelogue, but rather a collection of the observations and impressions of the places we visited and the people we met.
London
We flew into London Heathrow on a pretty packed flight. The plane had departed Detroit around 10pm just before some wicked storms moved in. We tried to sleep on the flight, and even took earplugs to facilitate that. Sadly, they only minimized any noise rather than completely stopping it. I got a fitful three hours in, totally missing dinner service. Then a little later I got another hour that felt like it did more to refresh me than the other three. I'm a little more used to working on 3-4 hours of sleep than Julayne is, so overall I think I fared better the next day, but looking at pictures of me in our hotel room that night you can tell I'm pretty knackered (that means tired to my fellow yanks).
London is an old city, and its infrastructure has been around a long time. Some parts are new and shiny, and others have been there for centuries. We learned about this getting to our hotel. We had two large suitcases and two small bags. We took a very modern commuter train called the Heathrow Express (which I kept wanting to call the Hogwort's express) to Paddington Station. Then from there we took the Tube, London's subway system. When we arrived at the Piccadilly Circus station, which was near our hotel, we had two sets of stairs to carry the suitcases up, along with a couple very steep escalators. In fact many of the older stations in the city center are not handicap accessible at all, and even the ones that are can require a lot of walking to get from train to train or from train to street level. They are working to revamp many of the stations, but most won't be done until nearly 2020. It'll be interesting to see how that affects visitors for the Olympics next year.
The city itself is a mixture. Obviously there is much about it that is old, even ancient. We saw tombs and gravestones at St. Paul's Cathedral that went back to the 1500's, and there might have been some from even earlier. The recognizable landmarks have obviously been there quite a long time. They even admit that for the most part the major highways leading to and from London, such as the A1, are pretty much still following the roads put in place by the Romans. We heard a lot about former kings and queens, and about the great fire of 1666 which destroyed much of the city. As we walked down the passageways of the tube stations with their 1930's tile work it was easy to imagine them filled with people during the Blitz in WWII.
One thing I noticed was that, except for the obvious tourists, the people that were moving about the city tended to be rather young. I noticed very few people on the streets and tube that were older, except for others who were obviously tourists. Also, the city is very cosmopolitan. Not surprisingly, everyone we talked to had an accent, but many times it was not a British one. London is a great melting pot, and after a while I felt like I could be in any city in the world.
One of our great pleasures on this trip was to finally meet face-to-face with our Twitter and Facebook friend Martyn Casserly. He is a fellow podcaster, and we have been chatting with him online for a couple of years now. He graciously arranged to get a cell phone for us, as ours were incompatible with the UK networks, so we met up with him our second day to get that from him. We had a quick bite and a coffee at Starbucks and spent an enjoyable half-hour talking. We were able to meet again on Saturday afternoon where we found a quiet cafe and talked for another three hours or so. It was great fun.
On Sunday morning we joined Martyn and his wife Naomi for worship at a local Anglican church, St. Hughs. It was an odd service in that the building they worship in is being torn down and a new one built in its place. So for the next two years they will be using another local church building on Sunday mornings. The service was one part saying goodbye, and one part setting out for an exciting journey that will end two years later in a new building of their own.
The last song was called "Moses, I know you’re the man" and the priest so wanted us to be able to sing it well we went over a verse at the start of the service. When we got to the end and were singing the song it made for an unusual picture. The words are casual and speak of the Exodus, but the tune is ragtime. And as we were singing with as much gusto as we can mange, the officiants in thier robes were bowing to the cross with great solumnity and processing out even as they sang along. It was such a juxtoposition of ceremony and casualness that the moment has stuck with me, and is one that comes to mind when I think of our time in London.
Afterward we went back to the Casserly's place to hang out for a bit, then went to a wonderful noodle place with Martyn's entire family consisting of their two delightful little girls, Martyn's mother, and cousin. It was Matryn's birthday outing, and we were glad to be invited to be a part of it. Afterwards we got an ice cream near the Globe Theater and spent some time in a small private garden that they had access to. It was a wonderful afternoon, and probably my favorite part of our visit to London.
We saw lots of other stuff that I won't spend time here talking about. Visit my Facebook page to see pictures of all the places we went, and most of them will speak for themselves.
Next time I will talk about the second part of our trip: Yorkshire.
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