Europe 2013, Part 3: London

On May 1, 2013, after leaving Keukenhoff Gardens, we took a bus to the "Hook of Holland" (Hoek van Holland, or "Corner of Holland", because it sticks out). There we caught a Stena Line ferry to England.

The ferry can indeed carry cars, but it also is like a mini-cruise. It included a nice dinner.

The ferry ride also included overnight accommodations in a private cabin.

In the morning, we awoke to the intercom playing "Don't Worry—Be Happy," enjoyed the breakfast buffet, and then caught our train to London.

Along the way, we had a lovely conversation with a lady from The Netherlands named Lela, and her 14-year-old daughter Diona, both of whom spoke English quite well.

Once in London, we stashed our luggage at a "Left Luggage" place, and then caught a bus for Picadilly Square.

I thought this car looked darned English.

We saw lots of monuments and statues around town. Here is Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.

We rode the hop-on hop-off double-decker bus around London to get an overview of what was there. (Anyone know where this square is?)

We sat on top so we would have a good view of everything.

Here is "Green Park", so called because it doesn't really have flowers, ponds, or much of anything else. The story goes that Queen Catherine discovered that her husband, King Charles II, had picked flowers there for another woman, so she ordered that all flowers in the park be pulled and no more planted.

Here is the Lexus of J.K. Rowling (author of Harry Potter). You can tell she's rich—not because of the Lexus, but because she has her own parking space.

Around 1700, England introduced a "window tax" designed to tax wealthy people, judged by how many windows they had in their house. So many people filled in some of their windows to avoid the tax. By the time the tax was repealed in 1850, many houses had already built walls and decorated or arranged the interior such that they didn't bother replacing the windows. So to this day, you still see filled-in windows like this around town.

Here is the famous "London Eye" Ferris wheel, with "Big Ben" showing through the middle.

I liked how stripy this building was. It's probably famous or something.

This is the monument to the Great Fire of London, which took place in 1666. It is 202 feet (62m) tall, and is built 202 feet from where the fire started. The fire gutted the medieval city of London inside the old Roman city wall, and destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the city's 80,000 inhabitants.

Here you can see the Tower Bridge (not to be confused with the latest "London Bridge", built in 1973, which is a half a mile upstream. The earliest London Bridge was built of wood by the Romans, but kept falling down.) The Tower Bridge is located near the Tower of London, and was completed in 1894.

Above the Tower of London, you can see a building that people call "The Gherkin", because it looks like a pickle.

We got off the hop-on/hop-off bus at The Tower of London, where we got some traditional fish & chips for lunch before taking a tour. I really wanted some ice cream, but I was disappointed at the lame, expensive offerings I found. Then I saw a Ben & Jerry's across the street, where they had excellent ice cream for much less, and this made me happy.

The Tower of London was built a few years after the Norman Conquest by William the Conquerer.

For about 500 years, the king and queen of England lived in the Tower of London, and the fortress around it was meant to protect them.

It still has a moat around it, but now without the water.

We were led on a tour of the tower by one of the Yeomen Warders (ceremonial guardians) of the Tower of London, popularly known as "beefeaters." Our guy made sure we understood that he was not a "servant", but a "soldier" who also happened to give tours. Also, he pointed out that he was not wearing a "costume", pretending to be someone; this was his actual uniform.

Our Beefeater was named Bill Callaghan, and he was hilarious.

Here is a 1 1/2-minute clip of him giving a quick intro to the tower and teasing the audience.

Inside the Tower was an assortment of displays, including suits of armor.

These two suits of armor reminded me of David and Goliath.

There was a dragon there made of shields and other armor.

The spiral staircase was narrow and steep.

There was one room where a variety of torture devices were displayed. That was sad.

Apparently the queen's guards wear those tall furry hats (originally bear skin) in order to appear taller and more intimidating.

Linette pretended to make a phone call in one of their famous phone booths.

Like I mentioned, the Tower Bridge is right next to the Tower of London.

We skipped out on seeing the jewels, as we had to go catch a boat ride that was included with our bus tour. Once on the boat, we went under the London Bridge.

We also saw the Millennium Bridge (built in 2000). It is also called the "Wibbly Wobbly Bridge", because when it was first built, it swayed under normal pedestrian foot traffic, requiring it to be stabilized with a bunch of springy boxes that absorb the vibrations.

We floated past Parliament on our boat tour, and then walked back over to it afterwards.

Here I am at Parliament. In honor of my brother Bob, I call this picture, "A Randy and Two Bobbies".

When we saw Big Ben, I made sure the time on my watch was in sync.

That afternoon, we made our way to the home of Dan and Marcia Ventura. Dan was my officemate in grad school at BYU, and later became a professor there. In 2013, he went on sabbatical with his whole family, during which they spent two months in Dublin, Ireland; two months in London, England; and two months in Paris, France. He said they were "going through money like it was toilet paper," but they had an amazing experience.

As luck would have it, one of their neighbors from Utah just happened to be visiting the same week as we were (the only visitors they received the whole 6 months), so they didn't have room to put us up. So we rented a room in someone's home via "At Home in London". The room appeared to be one of the kids' old rooms, but it worked fine.

The view of the back yard from our window included a marble-looking statue, which was cute.

And the living room was complete with portraits of old stodgy English people, so it seemed pretty legit.

And they had bookshelves overflowing with books, featuring titles like, "The Battle of Hastings, 1066".

The couple made us breakfast each morning and they were very nice, though Linette felt a little funny staying at a random person's house and having people watch us eat.

We took "The Underground" (subway) everywhere, and got used to hearing the recorded lady say, "Mind the gap" when you got on and off.

The next day, we took the hop-on/hop-off bus around town a bit more.

Not sure what the deal is with this guy or the pink car, but I thought it was awesome.

I also thought this was a funny title for a play.

We got off the bus at the British Museum. It was free and included a free restroom, which seems to be rare in Europe.

The museum has roughly 80,000 objects on display at any given time, out of some 8 million in their holdings.

The museum was fascinating. Here one of the volunteers lets Linette hold a really old artifact.

And here is a Roman coin from almost 2000 years ago that had been found in the Themes River just a few days before. Apparently people find old Roman stuff almost every day.

Caches (or "hoards") of coins have been found in many locations.

One display showed a twenty billion dollar bill from the Bank of Zimbabwe, the result of hyperinflation after the government was taken over by some well-intentioned people who tried to print money to solve the country's new financial problems.

I thought, "20 billion dollars, that's peanuts!" I have an actual Zimbabwe One Hundred Trillion Dollar bill (which at one point could buy a loaf of bread).

There's something fishy about this mosaic...

We love museums, but I find that my feet eventually start hurting so bad that it's hard to enjoy myself. So I was almost giddy when I saw that the British Museum had a rack of small folding chairs that you are welcome to use for free. They act like a cane when you're walking around, and then when you find something interesting, you can pop it open, take a seat, and rest your feet for a few minutes. Brilliant!

They had a bunch of cool Egyptian stuff.

I liked how they let you hold some of the ancient artifacts.

Here's a solar system simulator.

These guys looked like chess pieces.

I thought it was beautiful how they decorated this pottery with the stark contrast between the black and white layers.

This "Last Supper" wooden sculpture had amazing detail.

The Asian section had some funky hats and beautiful ceramics.

We spent most of the day in the museum. As we walked outside, we found one of the classic red phone booths (probably used mostly as a quiet place to use your cell phone. Or for Superman to change.)

As we walked along, we came across Drury Lane, which is, of course, where the Muffin Man lives.

So we made sure to have a muffin there.

This bridge between two buildings is probably flat, but it sure looks like you end up turning upside-down.

That evening we went to see The Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre (London's answer to Broadway).

Linette got me a Lion candy bar.

The set was beautiful. The plot, songs, and even jokes were pretty much identical to the movie, so I was a bit disappointed to get nothing new, but the puppetry was amazing.

The views at night from the bridges were magical.

The next morning, we went to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard—along with a plethora of other people.

The most entertaining part was when a marching band came through.

Sometimes when we can't make decisions, we call it "waffling", and it seems to happen to us regularly. So I couldn't resist getting a waffle and ice cream from the Wafflemeister. I didn't waffle about that decision for a second, and it was wonderful.

On the east coast and around the world, milkshakes are often very runny compared to ones typically found in the west, so I hear.

We spent a couple hours in the science museum by Hyde Park. Here is a CRAY-1 supercomputer from 1975, which could perform 160 million floating point operations per second (160 MFLOPs). My iPhone XS (2020) can do about 1000 MFLOPs. :)

When I was in 9th grade, I bought an Apple ][ computer. Here is an original Apple computer (i.e., an Apple "1"), with a logic board screwed into a wooden case.

I thought this record was funny.

That evening, we met up with Dan & Marcia Ventura's family to explore Westminster Abbey.

Instead of walking through the building as tourists, we decided to join a mass that was taking place that evening. It was cool to hear the boy's choir as the voices echoed around the big hall. (We couldn't take pictures during the service, so you'll just have to imagine a boy's choir in white robes).

This hallway is open to the courtyard on one side.

After the service, we walked over to see Big Ben and the parliament building.

We walked across a bridge over the Thames (pronounced "tems") River, and found a festival going on called "Streets of Spain", with lots of shops and street food options.

Linette got some bratwurst at the very first booth. Others of us got Moroccan food (grilled meat wrapped in a flat bread), and Dan got some tasty things to share (meat with cinnamon wrapped in something like a tortilla). 

We enjoyed seeing views of the town and statues and flowers as we walked around in the evening light.

Here is a monument to the English composer Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900). He wrote music for the Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, several operas and orchestral works, and some hymns, including "Onward, Christian Soldiers".

 

There was some pretty cool wall art around town.

Back at Dan's place, they fed us some "sticky toffee pudding", which, unlike it sounds to Americans, is really a kind of cake ("Pudding" tends to mean "dessert" in the UK). We talked until late and then tore ourselves away to walk back to our place and get some sleep.

On Sunday morning, we got on the underground and saw that we had to switch trains, so we got off somewhere that seemed to make sense. That's when we noticed the Venturas all dressed in their Sunday clothes waiting at the same stop, so we knew we were in the right place.

Their youngest daughter Kali wore white to church that day, since her baptism was that afternoon (just after we had to leave, unfortunately). After church we watched as the Ventura girls practiced a song that they were planning to sing at the baptism, so we felt like we at least got a preview.

After church we walked through the Victoria & Albert museum and looked at a bunch of statues and art work.

Finally, we went back to the Venturas where a couch was calling my name, and I passed out and enjoyed a very nice Sunday nap. They fed us some great Thai food, and topped it off with a biscuit (i.e., a cookie) topped with Nutella.

At that point, we had to leave to catch our train, so we said good-bye, told Kali she looked beautiful in her baptism dress, gave hugs, and headed out.

As we waited for the underground, I thought it was appropriate that this sign indicated that Linette was "way out"!

Incidentally, I loved this T-shirt that combined the "Underground" logo with the oft-spoken warning at the platform, "Mind the gap".

There was a problem with the subways that got us to Stratford Station with only 15 minutes to spare before our train for the coast was to leave. I decided to run out and try to turn in our "Oyster cards" for the 5 pound refund, but saw that there was a line, so decided to skip that.

When I got back to the train, I couldn't find Linette, so I walked up the aisle, and even ran outside the train to more quickly get to the other cars, hoping desperately that the doors wouldn't close as I was doing that. If that happened, one of us wouldn't have a ticket; I would likely not make it to the ferry before it left; and our cell phones didn't work in Europe in 2013, so we would have been really hosed. Fortunately, I finally found her blissfully playing "Ticket to Ride" on her phone, and all was well.

We boarded the ferry again, and again enjoyed a fancy dinner. I chose not to order the duck liver pâté, because of the duck. And the liver. And pâté. Gross.

After dinner we bumped into two Canadian college girls we had met on the train. One had just graduated college and they were backpacking around Europe for a while before she had to work for the rest of her life.

Linette and I were tired enough to get a great night's sleep on the ferry, and we woke up back in The Netherlands.

In the next and final episode, we ride bikes through the gorgeous Holland countryside to finish off our trip.