| SCOTLAND VACATION 2004 May 18 - May 30, 2004 JOURNAL ENTRY 4 entry begun on May 21st, 2004 at 09:30 London Time Well, about halfway to Acton Town station our train stopped. Several announcements were made, and though they were fairly difficult to hear, we eventually pieced together that either there was a signal mix-up at Hammersmith or someone had been hit on the Piccadilly Line. Or both. At any rate, we were stuck for slightly over an hour before beginning to finally move again. When we made it to our next stop, Acton Town, we (and almost all the other passengers) jumped over to the District Line. We took that to Victoria Station to see if we could get on a bus tour of London and maybe confirm seats on the train to Edinburgh the next day. We reached Victoria Station and got in a line professing to be where to buy tickets for the bus tours. When we got to the counter though, they had different prices than we'd been told by the brochure and they didn't offer the package we wanted (which included a £3 fish and chips lunch at the Sherlock Holmes Pub). So we went out, figured out we'd have to go to King's Cross Station to get our seat reservations for heading to Berwick Upon Tweed, and walked outside. Out the doors, we spotted the tour bus starting point, and a (all together now) nice lady sold us tickets, including the lunch, directly in front of the buses. We boarded the bus, climbing to the top level. Our tour guide was very friendly and knowledgeable. We got to see just about everything we wanted to on the tour, including Buckingham Palace, St. James Park, Westminster Abbey, Lambeth Bridge, Westminster Bridge, Big Ben, Parliament, Downing Street (which is all fenced off and blockaded now), Horse Guards' Palace, Trafalgar Square, St. Paul's Cathedral, Bank of England, the Monument, London Bridge, the London Dungeon, Tower Bridge, the HMS Belfast, the Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, Southwark Bridge, City Hall, Millennium Bridge, the quarters for all the different palace guards and soldiers/guards for the queen, Shakespeare's Globe Theater (the new one and where the old one used to be), Backfriars Bridge, the London Eye, and the art center housing the Imax theater. Also of particular interest were the dragons marking the boundaries of the old roman section of London. Seeing Pudding Street, where the Great Fire of London started (destroying 14,000 structures and the Black Plague's existence in London simultaneously) was rather interesting as well. It was a somewhat cooler day, even bringing a slight drizzle of rain in occasionally. Enough to drive most passengers to the bottom level of the bus, which was drier (we personally quite enjoyed the cool light mist falling on us). It started finally raining somewhat significantly about the time we got off the bus and were ducking into the Sherlock Holmes Pub for lunch. The pub was very busy, so we asked a woman if we could sit at her table. She did not speak English, but seemed amiable, so I went to the restroom and left Ginger at the table. When I came back, Ginger went to the restroom, and I sat at the table with the woman, who said nothing and averted her eyes the whole time, occasionally scowling. This seemed to not be one of the nice ladies this journey has been privy to thus far. When Ginger got back to the table, I went and got our fish and chips, as well as some attitude from the lady at the food counter (she slapped my hand when I reached for utensils she had just pointed out to me, then handed them to me herself), and sat down to eat. Despite the poor attitudes abounding, the fish and chips were superb and very welcome after a long morning (and early afternoon) of shopping and sightseeing. By the time our meal was done, so was the rain. We wandered around Trafalgar Square a bit, stopping to buy some gifts, souvenirs, and an international adapter so we could recharge the batteries on our digital camera (both were already almost gone, if that tells you anything about volume of pictures taken so far on this trip), and then went across to Charring Cross station to make our way to King's Cross. Along the way, we found out that the Piccadilly Line was still being adversely affected by whatever had been stalling it four or five hours earlier. At King's Cross, we quickly discovered the advance tickets area and reserved two non-smoking seats for the 13:00 train leaving for Berwick Upon Tweed, to arrive at 16:39. Having achieved that, we wandered outside to make a decision about our next move. We figured we had plenty of time without much of anything else planned to accomplish, so we decided to take a bus back to the hotel instead of riding the tube. The ride on the 73 bus took us primarily down Oxford Street, where there were quite ample shopping opportunities to be had, including three Gaps and two Benettons in the space of a few blocks. The bus itself was a hop on hop off bus, which means that rather than wait for people to show their tickets (or buy one) as they boarded, a bus representative would instead come by every so often and check everyone for tickets. We had purchased a three day pass good for any tube ride and almost every bus, so there were never any problems with that. They are very tough on security when it comes to trains and buses around here; you must slide your ticket through when you enter a tube station and again when you leave, and there are no trash cans in the stations' platforms for fear of a bomb being placed in them. Not much trash on the floors as a result, which may stem for the heavy fines we hear are enforced. Eventually our bus turned to go along Hyde Park, and was about to curve into a direction we didn't want, so we hopped off the 73 and onto the 74. The 74 took us by the Marble Arch on our way back through Knightsbridge and Kensington. We jumped off past the "drained" South Kensington tube stop, got onto the Gloucester Road District Line train, and took that back to Earl's Court and our bed and breakfast. IMAGES FROM JOURNAL ENTRY 4 ---> |