Trip details: London

(This is the second of a series of posts about our trip to Massachusetts, London, Bath, and Wales).

We flew out of Boston at 9AM on an American Airlines flight to London. The flight was completely full, and we had the "honor" of having seats in the middle section of the very last row on the plane. We couldn't even see a window, let alone see outside. Not that there was very much to see except clouds and waves. The flight was VERY bumpy - we flew over the remains of the hurricane that had caused all the rain in Boston the day we landed there.

We arrived in London at about 9PM (thanks to a 5-hour time difference). It was raining there as well. It only took us about 20 minutes to clear customs, a huge improvement over our last time (when it took two and a half HOURS). I'd done my research and discovered that there's a Piccadilly Line Tube stop at Heathrow that would take us to Holborn station (4 blocks from our hotel) without having to change trains. So we added ten pounds to each of our Oyster cards, hopped on the train, and 45 minutes later checked into our hotel, the Park Inn Russell Square. We took sleeping pills and slepth through the entire night.

What a nice place! It's an older building (maybe the late 1800's?), but our room although small was recently refurbished. Everything was new. And best of all, the bathroom had very simple controls! The ONLY drawback was that the temperature in our room was stuck at about 75-80 degrees, and the corridor outside it was about 80 or so. Opening the room's window alleviated that problem.

The next morning (Friday, Sept 3), we went down to the hotel restaurant and had a nice buffet breakfast (included in the $165 room charge), and then headed out to see London. The rain had stopped, but it was breezy and cool. We walked to Charing Cross Road and headed south, looking for the site of one of our favorite books, "84 Charing Cross Road", the wonderful story of the long-distance relationship between an American writer and the staff of a second-hand bookstore at the aforementioned address in London. Sadly, the bookstore is long-gone, and been replaced by a wine bar. But there's a nice plaque in the wall, and we took pictures of it.

Then it was time to just wander around. We headed to Trafalgar Square, and found something unexpected in one corner - a statue of George Washington! We had lunch at a ubiquitous London restaurant "Pred a Manger" a chain of sandwich and coffee shops all over London. Then we walked to a rubber stamp store Carrie had discovered when doing research for the trip. Carrie went in & shopped, and I looked around the neighborhood, and had a short fantasy about opening a "carriecards" store on the street and living above it. Nice fantasy! Then it was on to Oxford Street for Carrie to do some shopping and then back to the hotel. Dinner at a nearby pub.

The next day (Sept 4) dawned sunny and warm. So we decided to go to one of Carrie's objectives for our stay: Hampton Court Palace. We hopped a double-decker bus to Waterloo Station (Waterloo freakin' Station!), and bought train tickets for Hampton Court. A 40-minute train ride later, we walked across a bridge over the Thames to Hampton Court. It's a palace built in the early 16th century by Cardinal Wolsely, a close confident of Henry the 8th. When the two had a falling out several years later, Wolsely gave it to Henry as a present. What a place! It's HUGE. We had a great time wandering around and watching the re-enactors portray Henry, members of his court, and Katherine Parr, who would become his sixth and final wife. In addition to the Tudor part of the castle, there's also a much later expansion, built by William of Orange (of William and Mary fame) in a completely different style. After lunching at the palace, we decided to head back to London via different conveyance: a "3-hour tour" down the Thames. It was great - we saw all kinds of interesting stuff: canal boats, locks, fancy English palaces like Ham House, ordinary English houses on the riverside (another short daydream about living on the Thames). We got back to London and got off right under the shadow of Big Ben. Took the Tube back to our hotel. That evening we went to an Indian/Bangladeshi restaurant very near the hotel called Hason Raja. What an AMAZING meal! We both thought we'd died and gone to heaven.

Sept 5 (Saturday), was reserved for the Portobello Road market, another of Carrie's objectives for the trip. We took the tube to Notting Hill Gate (near where "Notting Hill" was filmed). The market consists of a large number of booths and small stalls one one or both sides of Portobello Road for about a mile and a half. We both really enjoyed the market - they sold such things as fruit and "veg", second-hand stuff, collectibles, antiques (Carrie bought an antique printers stamp and some cigarette trading cards, and I bought an antique print), silver, cooked food, tacky tourist stuff, clothes,flowers, and all kinds of things. The crowd was a complete ethnic mix from all over the world. I'm sure there were other Americans there, but I don't remember one American voice. That night we had dinner at a forgettable Italian restaurant. I'd bought a Cuban cigar the day before, so that night after dinner, I smoked it while I walked up to Euston Station (where our train would leave the next day).

Next post: Llandudno and Northern Wales.