Some Last Notes

I had a wonderful time on my July trip!  Not being able to go to Paris was a big disappointment, but I managed to find other things to enjoy that week and I'm proud of myself for not just collapsing in a puddle and moping for that time.  It's the longest trip I've ever taken and two weeks of it were on my own (one of them unexpectedly) and it all was wonderful.  It gives me a lot of confidence about my ability to travel, either by myself or with others.  It's nice to be home now, but I have lots of great memories to treasure.  I know I'll be looking over my photos and recalling and sharing stories for a long time.

As my trip progressed, I made a note of some general ideas that occurred to me that weren't really specific to a particular day or event.  I've saved that list to share in this last post relating to my 2016 summer trip.  So here they are, in no particular order:

• When I was packing for this trip I looked at my large suitcase and thought about pulling it around for every change of hotels, possibly up and down stairs if I got a hotel without a "lift".  I made a last-minute decision to borrow my son's smaller suitcase and leave a few things out.  I was so glad I did that!  I was planning to use a small backpack as a carry-on anyway and I really didn't need all of that suitcase room.  Next time I take a trip I'm going to think hard about how I might downsize even more. 

• In spite of the above, the next time I travel in the summer and am not sure I'll have air conditioning I might pack one of those tiny little fans they sell for offices.  It would have been really nice to have along....

• If you like to do read as I do, an e-book reader is an excellent way to carry around weeks worth of books without adding much volume or weight to your load.  I have a first-generation kobo and it can hold more books than I would read in a year.  It was always in my purse and during the time when I was on my own I'd pull it out and read a chapter when I stopped for a meal.

• A question: why does the U.K. not believe in water fountains??  I noticed this the other time I traveled in Great Britain too.  The British are such lovely people in general and I think they implemented recycling long before we did in North America, but they seem to have a blind spot when it comes to water.  In hot weather there are lots of warnings posted about staying hydrated and I agree it's very important, but the only way to do that while traveling in the U.K. seems to be to keep buying little plastic bottles of water.  I have a nice refillable bottle that I use at home and my workplace has drinking fountains with high spouts so that I can fill it up when it gets low.  But in the U.K. it was fairly rare to find a drinking fountain or even a bathroom sink that would deliver water in a way that I could drink out of it or fill up even a small container.  I wasted a lot of money and created a lot of trash buying plastic water bottles.  The one exception was the hotel at Canterbury, which had a "water station" in the hall, where you could fill water bottles with your choice of still or sparkling mineral water.  I chatted with another North American guest at this water station and instead of discussing the cathedral or other things about the hotel we just raved about how happy we were to find all this free water!

• British grocery stores sell very good nutritious sandwiches.  And there are often grocery stores at the center of town -- even small ones in downtown London and in train and tube stations there.  This is such a nice way of getting lunch when you're traveling.  It's cheap and convenient.  I usually don't want to spend the time and money for a sit-down lunch when I'm sightseeing.  Restaurant meals are fun but you can get tired of them on a long trip.  I love being able to walk into a grocery store and buy a sandwich and a piece of fruit and maybe a bag of "chips" and then eating it in a park.  Or packing it away in my bag until later when I want it. 

• I wish we had trains like the British trains in North America!  They are great for long distances and short ones too.  David and I took trains from London to York, then York to Edinburgh, and then Edinburgh back to London and each one made only a few stops.  They were comfortable and quiet and very pleasant.  They even had someone with a "trolly" selling drinks and snacks.  They stopped in the middle of town instead of an airport that was far away from everything.  There were several choices of times every day.  A very civilized way to travel.  And when you're only going a short way they've got great trains for that too.  We took a train for our day trip to Stirling Castle from Edinburgh and I took trains from London to Dover to Canterbury and back to London.  Those stopped at more places, but were still quite comfortable and convenient and with frequent choices of times.  I noticed people who got on at one town and got off one or two towns later and they just paid cash to the conductor instead of buying a ticket at the station.  That must be really convenient.  So much nicer than driving to a nearby town and having to find a parking spot.

• One more thing about trains: my only complaint is that some of the trains running the smaller routes don't have enough room for luggage.  They have small overhead racks that are fine for a backpack but no place for suitcases.  I was lucky that when I used these trains they weren't full and I was one of the few people with a suitcase, so I could just put my suitcase on the seat next to me.  But what do they do when the trains are more full?  A train going from Dover to London can't count on all of its passengers being on day trips....

• One of the challenges of a long trip is laundry.  During the miserable heat wave in London I was sweating through clothes so fast that I took a bag of icky, sweaty clothes over to a nearby laundry service.  I felt very pampered getting them back that evening beautifully clean and folded better than I've ever folded them in my life.  But it was expensive and not something I wanted to do all the time.  For the rest of the trip, I managed to wash my clothes in my hotel room.  Here are some tips:

• Wash a few things every evening; don't let them all pile up
• If you're going to be moving around, pack a few plastic bags in case you need to carry damp clothes in your suitcase.
• Try out something like Eucalan -- a hand-washing soap that doesn't need any rinsing. I have been using it for my hand-knits for years and it works just as well on other kinds of clothes.  It just takes a capful in a bathroom sink full of room-temperature water.  Dump in a shirt or two and some underwear and let it soak for 20-30 minutes, maybe turning it over once if some of it wants to float.
• The trick is getting things dry afterwards.  I drain the water out of the sink and then gently squeeze out each item until I can't get any more water out of it.  Then I roll them up in a towel and squeeze that.  And then I hang the clothes up to dry.  Almost everything will dry after that treatment in one or two nights, depending on the weather.  Sticking a couple of extra clothes hangers in the bottom of your suitcase is a great idea in case there are no hangers where you're staying.  
• If you're lucky enough to have a hotel room with a heated towel rack, drying is even easier.  I worry that these things get too hot to be safe with some of my clothes, so what I do is put a towel on the rack and put clothes over the towel.  It still speeds up the drying process quite a lot.

• This gripe may be a little silly or a specifically North American hangup, but What is the point of toast racks???  Every place I stayed included breakfast and in general the food was good, but in every place but one my breakfast included very cold, very dry toast served in a toast rack. If you live in North America, you may not even know what a toast rack is, so I put a picture beneath this point.  It seems to be an appliance that is perfectly designed to take nice warm toast and make sure it turns into cold, dry, unappetizing toast as quickly as possible.  Why????  I normally really like toast, but this ruins it.  I understand that if you're serving breakfast to lots of people in the morning it may be difficult to make sure everyone gets theirs when it's warm, but why would you spend money and space on these little gadgets that make absolutely sure everyone's toast will be stone cold and all dried out?  Do they really like it that way? Or do they just think it's a fancy way to serve toast in spite of the consequences?  There, just had to get that off my chest.  A great mystery....

• This next thing may sound odd coming from a Computing professor, but I tend to be a late adopter of some kinds of technology.  I think I use so much of it at work that I'm not always eager to acquire it in my personal life.  I was one of the last people I know to get a cell phone and then one of the last to upgrade from a simple cell phone to a "smart phone".  The last time I went on a major trip I had just bought my Android phone and hadn't really progressed beyond using it for phone calls and messages.  So this was the first trip I took with apps on my phone and I must say I'm finally a convert.  I carried much less paper and found many apps that saved me a lot of time and bother.  I did bring along my laptop, but I didn't do much with it except writing this blog.  Before the next time I travel I may try to get comfortable with the blogger app and save a lot of space and weight by leaving the laptop at home!  (Although maybe I still would want a regular keyboard for blog and e-mail....)  Here are some of the apps I enjoyed using during this trip.   My phone is an Android, but I believe most or all of these have equivalents for Apple phones.
  • The camera!  I suppose that goes without saying, but it's a better camera than the little point-and-shoot I own.  I brought the latter along as a backup but never used it.
  • The calendar to keep track of our travel reservations and other plans
  • Dropbox to manage some files that I wanted to have on my laptop as well as my phone.  These were mostly notes about times and places and directions.
  • hotels.com to keep track of our hotel reservations
  • VIA rail to keep track of our train reservations in Canada (getting to & from the Dorval airport)
  • The British Airways app -- electronic boarding passes and up to date flight information.  
  • trainline for managing our British train trips
  • Transport for Edinburgh, which helped us navigate the bus system in Edinburgh.  Really wonderful to have this kind of help when you're in an unfamiliar city!  If you tell it where you are and where you want to go it will display complete information about times and bus stop locations.  You can even buy and use electronic bus tickets -- completely paperless.  You just buy tickets with your credit card on the app and let the app show them to the bus driver when you get on the bus.  I hope the London tube system will figure out something like this to replace Oyster cards.  Maybe even Kingston Transit someday....
  • The London Tube Map: You tell it what station you're close to and what station you want to go to and it tells you all the details: what line to get on in which direction, what stops you'll pass, where to get off to transfer, how long each step will take, and so on.   The tube system is complicated enough that this saves a lot of time and error.
  • Games on cell phones are really nice ways to combat boredom during those little bits of dead time that happen while traveling -- waiting for a train or a flight, etc.  My favorite ones that I've got on my phone are Ken Ken and a solitaire game but there are millions to choose from.  I like to read and knit, but neither of those are very comfortable for small bits of time.
  • Google maps: Most people probably are familiar with this program and the app is great too for figuring out how to get places when you're in an unfamiliar city.  It's possible to download an area and use the app version of the program offline, but there are limits to the offline use.  In particular, it won't give you walking instructions, just instructions for driving, which are not always what you really want if you're on foot in a European city.  Still, it's helpful for planning out an excursion ahead of time or for getting an idea of how far away something is.
  • I've saved my very favorite app of all until last: Here We Go.  The next time I take a trip if you told me I could take along only one of my long list of apps I would probably  choose this one.  I use it at home too when I'm walking to a place I've never been before or when I decide to explore a new neighborhood or a new route when I'm walking for exercise.  It is a fairly simple mapping app.  It's not as fancy as Google maps, but its advantage is that it works much better offline without using up data (which is so expensive, especially when you're overseas).  Before you go on a trip you download maps for places you're planning on going.  After that, this app will work with the saved maps even when you're away from both wi fi and data.  You tell it where you want to go (from your current position or from another position if you're planning ahead) and it gives you a map showing your location and the suggested route to your destination.  You can change the scale and move around on the map to suit what you need.  It knows about footpaths as well as roads.  It will also give you directions (such as "walk 80 meters and then turn left on Elm Street").  It vibrates your phone when it's time to make a turn, so you can shove it in your pocket and not have to watch it all the time.  And -- my favorite feature -- if you take a wrong turn it will help you recover in the most efficient way without insisting that you retrace all your steps.  (I tested that feature very thoroughly on this vacation and can vouch for it!)  It occasionally acts up or is slow to update the map, but it still works very well.  If it misbehaves just restart it.  My family will tell you that I have a terrible sense of direction and am very talented at getting lost, but this app got me all around London and helped me walk to Dover Castle and lots of other places on this trip all by myself.  It's so much easier and more convenient than constantly unfolding a paper map and finding your place on it.  On the last day of my trip the app updated itself and announced some extra features, such as public transportation, but I have never used them; I have only used it for walking.  For walking in an unfamiliar place, though, I recommend it very highly.

• After that long list of apps, it's obvious that I used my cell phone heavily on this trip.  Taking pictures and making it show maps for long walks really does run down the battery.  I tried to start out each day with the phone fully charged, but even so there were many days when the battery couldn't last through everything I wanted to do.  So I'm very, very glad that I brought a good portable charger along with me -- one of these, although I'm not sure this is exactly the same model number as mine.  There are a lot of chargers like this out there and I can't recommend one over another, but I highly recommend having something like this.  I carried it in my purse all the time and if my phone (or ipod or kobo reader) started to get low on power I just plugged it in and left it in my purse with the charger and let it charge back up for a while, then plugged the charger in at night so it would be ready to help out again the next day.  Spend enough money to get one that can store enough charge to charge your phone (or other devices) several times before it has to be charged up again, just in case.

• It's fun to have some kind of pedometer when you go on a trip like this that involves a lot of walking.  I've already mentioned my fitbit in this blog and I really enjoyed having it along.  It's a watch that doubles as a pedometer so it's no extra trouble to take along.  I got one that measures my heart rate as well and I find I don't use that feature and I'm not sure how accurate it is.  If I had it to do over I would go with a simpler, cheaper model.  But the important thing is that at the end of the day when you get back to your home or hotel room with tired feet you can look at your step count and feel very virtuous!  Sometimes when you tramp around on a trip (or at home doing errands) you don't realise how many miles you're going.  

• If you do have a pedometer, let me recommend a fun web site to go with it: Walking 4 Fun.  It was created by someone who does a lot of long-distance walking trips.  You create an account and every day you enter the number of steps you have taken (or the number of miles you walked if you prefer).  You select one of the hikes the writer has done and each day the web site will tell you how far along you are on your virtual hike and show you pictures of what you've passed on your way and some of what the writer wrote on his blog about that area.  It's fun!  I've already "hiked" the whole Camino de Santiago (the French as well as the Spanish section) plus the West Highland Way and the Great Glen Way in Scotland and have started on the Appalachian Trail.  During my vacation the beautiful and interesting things I really did pass were enough of a motivation, but sometimes when I'm walking in my own familiar area the thought of adding to my virtual hike can add an incentive to go a little farther.  And the web site is certainly giving me ideas for hikes I'd like to take in person someday.

• I want to end by sharing a few more thoughts about walking.  It's the only form of exercise that I really enjoy.  It's a lot easier on the body than running but it has many benefits.  I was very pleasantly surprised the last time I went to the doctor.  He asked if I was exercising regularly and I braced myself for a lecture, but told him I liked to walk and was getting 10,000 steps on my pedometer most days.  He smiled and said that was excellent for my cardiac health and I should keep it up.  No lecture!  Besides the benefits for physical health, I have often found that a walk can do wonders to clear up my thinking.  If I'm having trouble with a person or situation in my life and I take a walk I'll often find that a solution or at least a possible strategy will have popped into my mind by the end of the walk, even if I wasn't consciously thinking about the issue.  Or if not, I will usually at least feel a little calmer about it.  The same goes when I'm stuck on some kind of technical issue at work.  I recently did a google search for the two words "walking" and "brain" and it came up with several pages that confirmed my feeling that walking is good for our cognitive health and can even help to combat the effects of aging on our brains and lower our risk of dementia.  So if you are like me and have a tendency towards couch-potatohood, try taking a little walk several times a week and once that has become a comfortable habit try going just a little farther.  You'll be surprised how far you're going before long and how much better you feel.

Happy Walking!

July 29: Last Day in London

It's probably obvious that I have been writing up a lot of these posts after the fact and not on the same day.  For most days I've needed at least an hour to organize my photos and write up a blog entry and many days during the trip I just didn't have enough time and/or energy.  It's now almost a week after I got home and I'm just getting to my last day in the U.K.  I still wanted to complete the blog because it has been a great way to organize my memories and I hope at least a few other people are enjoying it too and maybe getting ideas for wonderful trips of your own.

When I was a kid we'd come back from a trip and take our film in to be developed and then stick them into photo albums and write little notes reminding ourselves about dates and the people/places in the the pictures.  I tend to take a *lot* of pictures now, since I no longer have to think about the cost of film or developing.  It's great to have that freedom, but all those pictures tend to just sit in folders on my computer without any structure beyond their dates.  I'm losing the benefit of all of those little notes I used to write, reminding myself of where I was when I took pictures and who some of the people are.  I'm also not taking the time to weed out the bad pictures (blurry, badly framed, etc) and the duplicates.  Keeping a blog is one way to make all of this happen.  I'm not going to continue this into a blog of my daily life, but I'm resolved to do it every time I take an interesting trip and maybe occasionally just to document a pretty day that called for some good pictures.

OK, back to my trip....  Last Friday, July 29, is a week ago now and it was the last day of my trip.  I woke up a little sad about leaving London but also looking forward to being home with my family again after such a long time away.  My flight was scheduled to leave Heathrow at 6:15 p.m.  I had been getting e-mails from British Air warning me that Heathrow had been pretty crowded and suggesting I allow lots of time for the check-in process and suggesting I get there 3 hours early, which meant 3:15.  I figured things were backing up due to additional security after all the terrorism lately so I took it seriously and planned to catch the Heathrow Express from Paddington by 2:30.

That still left me a chunk of time in London and I didn't want to waste it.  I decided that a walk would be the perfect thing to drink in one last taste of this great city and to get some exercise to help offset the long hours of sitting on the airplane.  So I packed up and left my luggage at the hotel and headed out.

On my first day alone in London I walked from Westminster to the hotel I was staying in then.  Today I decided to make a similar walk -- from this hotel to Westminster but by a different route.  I wanted to go through Kensington Gardens this time because I really loved it when David and I walked there.  I counted backwards and figured out how long it would take me and added in some extra time for lunch and delays and decided I had plenty of time, so off I went and it was a truly wonderful walk and a great way to say goodbye to London.  It drizzled a little from time to time, but not enough to spoil the fun.

Goodbye to the pretty neighborhoods around my hotel:

The middle picture above shows a van in London advertising the U.S. television version of the very British story of Sherlock Holmes (which my family enjoys watching in Canada).  I found that amusing.

Goodbye to the "Round Pond" in Kensington Park, with its many birds, including swans (who can be very graceful but also so goofy looking sometimes!) and those funny ducks (geese?) with the eye patches.

Goodbye to Queen Victoria and the much-lamented Prince Albert:

Goodbye to the quiet pretty paths in Hyde Park:

Goodbye to the over-the-top fancy stuff on the London streets, like Wellington arch:

At this point I have to digress just a bit to explain a special surprise I got on this last walk.  I am very interested in all things royal, but I didn't attempt to see the iconic Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace.  I've been told that you have to show up hours early to stake out a spot to see it and that even then it's not really all that interesting, so I gave it a miss.  I didn't even find out what days and times it took place.

On this walk I went past Buckingham Palace and approached it from the back.  I walked along the sides of the palace gardens, which are surrounded by some high, scary walls:

I'm glad the royal family has someplace green they can walk in private.  

As I rounded the corner to the side of palace, I saw crowds outside the gates, which is normal, but I also heard music and wondered what it was.  And I noticed that the crowds weren't wandering around casually but seemed plastered to the gates.  Right at the corner there were just a few children peering in.  I looked over their heads and saw a lot of guards marching around, and the front gates were actually open.  I thought "no, it couldn't be!" and asked one of the kids "is this the Changing of the Guards?" and they looked at me and said "yeah" as if I were the stupidest grown-up they had encountered in their entire lives.  So I watched the whole thing right over their heads.  The people who told me the ceremony isn't super interesting were right, but still it's famous and it was fun to see it once.  And I got it "for free", with no lining up and waiting or having to plan my whole day around being there at the right time.  A nice goodbye back from London to me!

After the ceremony finished, the guards who were finished with their shifts and, I think, some who arrived just to beef up the ceremony, headed back out and up the Mall.  I was headed in a different direction to get to the Westminster tube stop and I saw four of the mounted guards split off and head down the street I was on.  There was a wide median area in the road and they were walking along it with traffic in each side of them.  Very calm, well-trained horses!  I think they must have been going to the guard's museum up the street.  I was close enough to see that three of these four guards were women, which was cool.

Finally, I got to Westminster, for my last view of the Parliament buildings:

Goodbye, Big Ben, and thanks for the time!  It was just past 12:30, which gave me two full hours to get back to the hotel and drag my bags to Paddington and grab a sandwich.  The timing worked out perfectly and I got to the check-in area in Heathrow just before 3:15 as planned.  Everything went smoothly at the airport and I had lots of time to sit by the gate and do some reading and even a little blog work.  Then they announced the flight and we lined up and then everything stopped.  The line didn't move.  And they told us that the flight was going to be delayed.  Back to our seats.  Finally the explanation came:  a piece of equipment on the plane was malfunctioning and needed to be replaced or repaired before we could take off.  Not very reassuring.  Later on they filled us in on the details: it was the microwave that wasn't working, not something safety-critical, but they still weren't allowed to take off on a long flight without a functioning microwave.  I suppose that makes sense if all of our food was frozen.  It wasn't possible to repair the microwave quickly, and their requests to replace the microwave were turning into mountains of paperwork.  Reminds me of Queen's!  They had another plane handy near the gate (complete with working microwave), so they started the process of switching around the planes and moving all of our meals from one to the other.  The flight was postponed from 6:15 to 9:15 and they gave us vouchers to buy "light refreshments" while we waited, which was very nice of them.  So I bought myself a sandwich and sat down for more reading and e-mails.

Finally, we boarded, and ended up taking off closer to 10 than to 9:15, so almost 4 hours late.  We had a late dinner and I managed to doze for a few hours.  We got to Montreal just before midnight their time, but that's 5 a.m. London time and I felt extremely groggy.  I waded through Customs & Immigrations half-asleep but very happy my visa situation had been straightened out before I got there so that there were the usual annoying lines to stand in but no problems.

Luckily, I already had a hotel room reserved near the hotel.  Even if the plane had not been delayed I would have arrived in Montreal too late to get a train back to Kingston that night.  So I hopped on the hotel shuttle bus and checked in to my hotel and slept like a log and woke up feeling pretty good.  I hung around and read and worked on the blog a little until it was time to catch my train and had a comfortable and uneventful ride home.   It was wonderful to get here and see David and Ian again!

And that's the end of the story of my trip.  It was an amazing adventure and I'm glad I did it.  I had much more time alone than originally planned and while I'm still very disappointed about Paris I've learned that I can handle being on my own and can re-group and change plans when I have to.  That's very nice to know for the future.  And the trip has given me many, many beautiful memories to carry with me for the rest of my life.

I am going to try to make one more post in this blog (maybe tomorrow) with some notes about practical things I learned about traveling, and then that will be it.  If you've gotten this far, thanks for hanging in here with me.  If you go someplace interesting and keep a blog, please let me know about it.  I like to hear about other people's adventures and see their pictures!

July 28: Two Museums and a Wall

I started out my day with a trip to the British Museum.  I've heard a lot of different opinions about this place.  Some people I know have raved about it and all the wonderful things on display there.  Others complain that it's crowded and overwhelming and difficult to find things in.  I have to say that I agree with both!  It was a nice day outside so I hoped the indoor museum crowd wouldn't be so awful, but it was.  And it didn't feel like such a nice crowd; people were pushing and shoving to see things and the place just had a bad vibe for me in spite of all the incredible things to see.

I bought a map that had a list of the ten "top things to see".  The first one was the Rosetta Stone and that was definitely on my own mental list and it was near the main lobby.  I managed to find it and it took me at least 10 minutes to work my way into the crowd enough to actually see it and the information about it.  I think this museum needs to consider some kind of crowd control around the more popular sights like I've seen in other museums -- such as a roped off "path" to lead people past the object in single file.  As it is, having to elbow my way in and be shoved by others took a lot of the thrill out of seeing this very famous piece of rock.  I made myself think about how old it was and the exciting role it played in historical research, but still I was glad to get out of the room.  I even considered beating a quick retreat out of the museum and finding something different to do today.

I cooled down, though, and decided to pick some galleries and wander through them and enjoy what I saw along the way instead of targeting those top sights.  That was a much more productive approach and I started to have fun.  I decided that since this was the British Museum I'd start with some of the galleries with artifacts from Britian.  It was still crowded, but not impossible, and I was able to take a few pictures and I'll share some of my favorites.

This gold "cape" was found in Wales and was from the early Bronze Age (1900-1600 B.C.):

Here are some artifacts from the 2nd century A.D., during the Roman occupation.  The statue in the middle is Mars:

This is part of a floor mosaic from a 4th century Roman villa in Dorset.  Because of the letters and symbols in the whole mosaic, it is thought to be a depiction of Jesus, which makes it "one of the most important early Christian remains from the Roman Empire".

This helmet is part of the "Sutton Hoo ship burial" from Anglo-Saxon times, probably belonging to a 7th century king:

One of my very favorite things I saw in the British Museum was the "Lewis Chessmen", found on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and thought to date from around 1200 A.D., a period when the western islands of Scotland belonged to Norway -- so they are thought to have been made in Norway.  They are beautifully carved out of ivory and whale's teeth.

In another section of the museum I saw some beautiful sculptures from Rome:
and a whole gallery full of interesting clocks.  The latter included this incredible "automaton" from 16th century Germany.  It would "sail" across a banquet table to announce the start of dinner.  It includes a tiny clock at the base of the mast that you can't really see from my pictures:


So I did enjoy the British Museum after a bit of an adjustment to the size and crowds.  I had lunch there and stayed until mid-afternoon.

Afterwards, I went to the Museum of London.  I was interested not as much in the museum as in the fact that the museum was advertised to have a section of the old London wall inside it or next to it -- I never was sure which. It has been so interesting to see the old medieval/Roman walls in York and Canterbury on this trip that I thought it would be cool to see the remnants of London's wall as well.

I got to the museum and didn't see an old wall.  I would have gone in and asked, but there was an enormous and noisy school group entering the museum.  After the crowds at the British Museum I didn't think I could take that.  I walked all around the outside of the museum with no luck and gave up.  I did see something else interesting, though: a plaque marking the approximate spot of John Wesley's conversion:

I wouldn't have noticed that if I hadn't been looking for the wall, so it seemed like a fair trade.  I started heading back to the tube stop to go back to my hotel.  However, this was one of those times when my very bad memory for directions worked in my favor.  I took a wrong turn and got all mixed up about where to find the tube and found this instead:

How's that for serendipity?  I had to give up on finding the old London wall to walk right into it a few minutes later!  And I'm not done yet.  Here's a separate piece of the wall I encountered further down the street:

This second piece was accompanied by a sign explaining that this part of the wall was revealed by German bombing during World War II:

I love the idea that some good thing came out of the Blitz besides all the horrible damage it did!

July 27: Hampton Court

I have to confess a certain fascination with Henry VIII.  When I was a kid I heard the old Herman's Hermit's song -- "I'm 'Enry the 8th, I am" -- and drove my family crazy singing it around the house.  My mother (a teacher) sat me down and explained to me why it was funny and helped me look up Henry VIII in our encyclopedia.  That led to an ongoing interest in the monarchy and British history, which I've really fed on this trip.  And Hampton Court is one of the prime destinations for Henry VIII enthusiasts.  His story is really a pretty awful one, but I'm grateful to him and to Herman's Hermits because that silly song was the first thing that hooked me into history as stories about real people.

Today I finally visited Hampton Court, a place I've wanted to see for many years, because of its history with Henry VIII and because it sounded like such a huge and beautiful place.  It didn't quite make the cut during the short visit I made to London 5 years ago so it was a priority for this trip and today was the day.  The weather was perfect -- cool enough to be comfortable walking around but no rain.

Hampton Court is about 15 miles from the center of London, but it wasn't hard to get to.  I took a tube to Wimbleton (no tennis courts to be seen from where I was!) and then a regular train the rest of the way, all part of the same web of London transit.  I'm so impressed with London's transportation system.  It may not be perfect, but it's so much better than mass transit in many other cities I've been to.


Like Whitehall Palace, Hampton Court was owned by Cardinal Wolsey before Henry VIII.  Wolsey gave Hampton Court as a gift to Henry, hoping to stave off his downfall, but it didn't work.  Wolsey died on the way to the Tower, where he would most likely have lost his head.

Hampton Court is located on the Thames and can be reached by boat from central London.  That sounded like fun, but it would have cut down on the time I would have to explore the palace. This picture is of a boat arriving later in the day than I did.

It was a quick walk from the train station to the gates of the palace:

And here, finally, is my first view of Hampton Court Palace:

It is an *enormous* building with many, many sections and big courtyards and surrounded by large, beautiful gardens.  I couldn't see it all thoroughly in one day.  If I visit London again some day (which I hope I will) I may have to come back!

Here is one of the many inner courtyards:

One of the first places I visited was the Chapel Royal, which is still in use as a church and owned by the Queen.  Unfortunately, there were no services today but it was open to visitors.  We weren't allowed to take pictures in it, but it was beautiful.  And up in the Royal Pew there was a case with a replica of the Tudor Crown.  The original was worn by Henry VIII and also James I and Charles I, but was broken up and its gems sold during the Commonwealth period.

The chapel had a beautiful ceiling (no pictures allowed!) and I found that many other rooms in the palace had various kind of lovely and interesting ceilings, at least one of which was designed by Henry VIII:

There are several "routes" you can follow through the palace and I didn't have time for them all.  One of the most popular was about Henry VIII and his famous six wives and all of the drama connected with them.  But I liked the fact that another of them was about Henry VIII's earlier life, before he turned into the old fat monster everyone pictures and started cycling through the wives.  This other route had information about the great successes of the first 20 years of his reign.  History and people are complicated and it's good to get a more balanced picture.

However, most people do come to the palace wanting to hear about the six wives and the programming at the palace made sure we got that.  There were actors in costume who drew visitors into the story from time to time.  I joined a group that was led around to different parts of the palace by actors playing the part of courtiers at the time of the arrest of Catherine Howard, Henry's 5th wife, who (unlike Anne Boleyn) probably really did cheat on him.  It was informative and dramatic and at times funny.  This actor played the part of a courtier sent by Henry to investigate the charges against Queen Catherine:

and this was Jane Boleyn, sister-in-law of Anne and a lady in waiting to Queen Catherine, who helped arrange some of the meetings between Catherine and her lover, Thomas Culpeper:

Another actor played the part of Culpeper, but I didn't get a good picture of him.  The tourists as a group played the part of servants in the "Queen's Household" and some people (not me) got drawn aside and given things to do such as answers to give to questions they would be asked during the investigation.  It was a lot of fun but also a little frightening to think about what the real events must have been like.  We were told at the end that both Jane Boleyn and Culpeper were eventually executed for their parts in the whole mess.

I also visited the famous "haunted gallery", which I'd heard of before. 

The story is that Catherine Howard was locked up in a room nearby for a while before she was taken to the Tower.  At some point she escaped and ran screaming down the hall trying to find the king and beg for mercy.  The king, however, had left the castle and the queen was taken back to her room and the rest is history.  There have been reports of her ghost being seen running down the hall.  I heard a tour guide telling a group that some people still say they feel very uneasy in the place, and that records of the first aid people show that more than half of the fainting episodes they've been called to across this huge palace and its grounds happened in that gallery.  I'm skeptical, but it's a fun story to shiver over....

I also visited the palace kitchens and learned a lot about food and food preparation in Tudor times.

And of course I spent time in the gorgeous gardens.  There were flower gardens and a huge working "kitchen garden".  I had lunch in a restaurant there, the nicest restaurant in a tourist attraction that I have encountered in my whole trip, and my salad included produce from the kitchen garden.



I also walked through the famous Hampton Court maze.  It was the first "puzzle maze" in Great Britain; older "mazes" had just one route through, with no choices to make.  I know the trick to getting through a maze and I found the center without a problem, but it did take a while.  Here's a selfie to prove I was there:

It was a great day -- hard on the feet, but lots of fun!

July 26: The World's Largest Ceiling Mural

Today, finally, was the day to pick up my visa for returning to Canada.  The visa place has regular appointments all day, but you can only pick up papers between 4 and 5.  I know that now and I realise it was in the small print of the e-mail I got.  But this morning I didn't know that and so I took a tube ride and showed up bright and early and got turned away and told to come back at 4.  Sigh....  This whole thing just keeps getting better.

After that disappointment I decided to go see the Banqueting House.  On my way I walked through one of the many pretty parks that are sprinkled throughout London, even the busy areas downtown:

Near there, I got the best view of the "London Eye" that I've had so far:

I've seen it peeking over things from lots of other spots, but this was the first time I have seen the entire circle.  It's interesting....  I have not been even tempted to ride it.  It's expensive and I don't like heights and I've had lots of good views of London from the ground.

The Banqueting House is all that's left of the famous Whitehall Palace, used by monarchs from Henry VIII through Charles I.  It's one of several properties Henry VIII acquired from Cardinal Wolsey when the latter went out of royal favor by not managing to get Henry a divorce. The British parliament and many other government buildings are nearby, which is why the whole area is referred to as Whitehall, and that name is sometimes used to refer to the British Government -- the way people sometimes refer to the President of the United States or the whole U.S. government as "the White House".  Most of Whitehall Palace was destroyed by a fire in 1698, but they made a priority of saving the Banqueting House.  Judging by today, this is a place that's not as popular with tourists as many of the other places I've been, but it's really worth a visit and I'm glad I went.

The building was designed by the famous architect Inigo Jones and its most prominent feature is its huge ceiling mural, done by Rubens.  Today the word "banqueting" suggests large sit-down dinners, but a "banquet" in those days was more of a post-dinner gathering with small fancy snacks and desserts and lavish entertainment, including the "masques" which were very popular at the time.  The building was also used for official events such as receiving foreign dignitaries.

The main part of the building is one enormous room.  It is a lovely room by itself, with nice proportions and pretty columns.  But what really hits you when you enter is that ceiling.  It is divided into 9 panels, each one of them quite huge.  It's pretty old-fashioned, with lots of fat cherubs and illustrations affirming the divine right of kings, but it's still quite striking.  It was impossible to take a picture that captured the feel of the whole ceiling, but here is my photo of one of the panels:

It's basically showing James I being taken up to heaven and congratulated for being such a wonderful king.  For a better idea of what the room and ceiling look like, you can try the official web site: http://www.hrp.org.uk/banqueting-house.

Admission included an audio guide which gave a history of the building and explained the ceiling piece by piece.  If you look around the room it's really quite comical: a fairly empty room with people wandering around looking up up instead of at where they are walking.  Scattered around the room are big beanbag chairs, where people can lie back and look up at that ceiling.

There are also a few "mirror tables" to help you see the ceiling.

Still, I think most people probably leave the room with a stiff neck, like I did -- and it was worth it!

There was also a small table in one corner of the room with a lady sitting by it and talking with people.  I wandered over to see what it was about and she had some artifacts from the original Whitehall Palace, dug up at various times after the fire.  She let us sit down with her one at a time and handle some of the things after we put on white cotton gloves.  There was a tile from a bath probably built for Henry VIII and a coin from the reign of Charles I.  Very interesting.

There's some real irony in the history of this building.  It was built for James I and his son, Charles I, commissioned the ceiling with is message about the divine rights of kings.  And the room was one of the last things Charles I saw as he was marched to his execution.  The scaffold was built outside a window in a part of the building that has been remodeled.  There is a large portrait of the king there to commemorate the event:

Quite a place with quite a history! In addition to being open to tourists, the Banquet Hall is often rented out for private use.  If you've got the money, you can "hire" it for a wedding, dinner, conference, fashion show,  etc.  It's also still used for occasional royal functions.

When I was done with the Banquet Hall I wandered around the Whitehall area and passed this interesting street name:

I ended up at Trafalgar Square, a place I remembered from my first trip to England.  It's a large, busy place, always full of tourists and locals.  It's bordered part of the way around by museums and is dominated by this high-up statue of Admiral Nelson (the victor of the Battle of Trafalgar):

The square also contains many other statues of heroic figures, like these:

And the large central fountain, surrounded by huge stone lions which every child who visits the square just has to climb:

And, um, whatever this is:

I bought a take-out lunch and sat down in the square to eat it.  It's a very nice place for lunch and people-watching.

And after I ate, I just had to take a picture of the place where I bought my lunch:

This chain has stores all over the U.K., at least every place I have visited during this trip, and it's wonderful.  It's actually nutritious fast food at a reasonable price by British standards.  It's easy to find a sandwich, but after a while I started craving fruit and vegetables and this place sells very nice packaged salads as well as very good sandwiches.  You can even pick up an apple or a small container of other kinds of fruit for dessert.  I have enjoyed a lot of "Pret a Manger" lunches and dinners during this trip and I wish they would expand into Canada.  To give you an idea of how popular it seems to be, this is just one of two "Pret a Manger" stores visible from Trafalgar Square!

And across the street from Trafalgar Square in a different direction is Canada House:

It's like an embassy, but since Canada is a member of the Commonwealth it's called a High Commission instead.

And finally it was time to get back on the tube and head back to the visa office where they returned my passport with a return visa glued into it.  I guess that's why they had to take my passport, but a warning would have been nice -- or a visa that they could have glued in on the spot when I came to pick it up....  At least now it's all done and I'm absolutely sure I can get back home.  Whew!