A Week in London

On the flight over from Bangkok Meg and I were both feeling a little low. We had really loved our time over in Asia and, though we were looking forward to seeing all of our friends back in the western world, it seemed that our real "adventures" were ending. A few glasses of wine in though we had come to terms with the situation and were starting to plan our time in the UK. After spending the first week or so with friends (Meg has quite a posse of people over in London as she worked there for two years back in 2005-2006) we figured maybe we would head up north and do a bike trip, or maybe hang out in Paris if the weather was poor. After arriving though, we decided to get back to Canada in time for a wedding (for our good friends Jarrod and Alexa) that wasn't planned when we booked our tickets 10 months ago! Meg busted into super planning mode and after some wrangling we had tickets home. We also had a new urgency to our time in London.

Stopping for a picture in front of the English Parliament on our first day walking through the city.

We dragged our bike boxes and panniers onto the tube and into a downtown London hostel. That is a lesson Meg and I learned during this trip; don't try to combine a bike trip with other travels. It is a real pain to box the bikes up so we didn't reassemble them when we arrived in London. Instead, we wrestled the boxes through crowded busses and subways while also trying to carry the rest of our gear. We then stored them in a storage locker at a train station.

Since Meg had seen most every London highlight during her time there, and I had seen none of them, and since Meg had many friends in London (and they don't really care much for me) we decided to split up for some of the week. I would stay in the hostel downtown visiting the sites of the city during the day while Meg tubed around the outlying cities staying with, and visiting, friends.

Meg, Gaya, and Kuldeep and Mark and me. Mark, being English, forced me to drink allot of beer while I was in London. I went through with it to humor him.

I had a chance to visit St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, the National Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Imperial War Museum. Everything was amazing! The national galleries/museums were fantastic, contained so much interesting information, and they were free! It made it guilt free to walk into the galleries with just an hour or so to spare and only view a section or two. The big historic buildings were equally good, though cost quite a bit more than nothing. The buildings are so integral to the history of London and it was neat to imagine people 1000 years ago being in the same building as I was standing in. In Westminster Abbey there was the oldest door in England which I think they said King Edward the Confessor probably opened at some point. The green where Anne Boleyn was beheaded is enclosed in the walls of the Tower of London. Princess Diana married Prince Charles in St. Paul's. To cut off the ridiculous gushiness, let me just stop by saying that it really is like the really old history you read about coming to life. That's actually how much of London was. The city is really fun to walk through as there are so many interesting buildings, and so many stories. We did a few walking tours of the city and again saw places straight out of history; one that jumps to mind is the place where William Wallace (Braveheart) was executed (that was on the Ghosts of London tour, it seemed like killing people in really gruesome ways was all the rage for awhile).

Some pictures from London. The London Eye, the Tower of London, and a bus of London.

I am not 100% sure what Meg was up to while I strolling healthily through the city and eating Tesco sandwiches. When we caught up in the evenings she often appeared unwashed and disheveled from days of heavy drinking. Nah, that's just a joke. She was out getting well caught up with Gaya and Ben, Brad, Sarah and Graham, and Kuldeep and Mark who were visiting from Canada at the same time we were there. She seemed to have acquired a few items of clothing along the way as well, though I think that was just through Gaya's overflow.

Aside from just touring about the city of London itself we got a couple really nice days in the country with Meg's quasi-relatives, Derek and Theresa. They took us through the countryside to visit some proper English pubs, with proper English pub food. We even got to see a first class football match when we went to see Derek and Theresa's grandson play in the end of season gold medal game. Sadly they lost, happily we got a chance to see some Ref heckling-English style-from some of the parents. Kuldeep and Mark joined us at D&T's as well which gave us a good chance to catch up on the last six months.

After a frantic and enjoyable week of visiting and sightseeing we made our way back to the airport, again with the bike boxes in tow. Our flights were leaving fairly early in the morning and the trains wouldn't start early enough for us to get to the airport in time. Since it would have been an expensive taxi ride we decided to take the last train (1:30am) instead and sleep in the terminal. As can be imagined this made for two fairly disoriented and disgruntled people. We had ended up on different flights getting home (to minimize the cost of changing our flights) and I thought it was a good thing when I left Meg in her line at 4am so I could change terminals and catch my flight. What I didn't realize was that Meg had food poisoning from our previous nights dinner and didn't end up having a very pleasant day. I had quite a nice flight.

A picture of the lot of us.