London Day Trip

On Saturday we went to London for a day trip. We left on the 9.43 train from Hungerford and arrived in London an hour later. Since we were planning on having tea in the afternoon, we ate lunch at Paddington Station (yes, where Paddington Bear was found) in a pub that was rather nice for being in a train station. Paddington Station has an entire three story food court, rather like a mall. It includes a Krispy Kream, three cafés (including a Starbucks) a nut and dried fruit store, a pharmacist (or chemist as they say here), a clothes store, one pub, a tie and scarf store, one pub, an ATM machine row, and a Hilton Hotel that extends from the second floor of Paddington to about seven more floors above grounds level. Anyways, after that we went to the Tower of London on the Tube (underground/subway) and rose out of the earth to pouring rain and many steps (we had brought our stroller which was apparently not a good move). We bought admission to the Tower waited to go inside the gate, only to find that it wasn’t like a big building but more like a mini city, so we were still stuck in the rain. We went into the keep (Who of my friends paid attention in social studies? My mom has at least five books on British history and we’ve only been here for a month!), or the central building of a castle, where at least half of the people were sheltering. Guess what the keep, where royalty lived in regular castles, was full of. You’ll never guess, so I’ll just tell you that it was full of weapons, armor, and wooden horses. It had been converted into an armory in about five hundred years ago and housed swords, people armor and horse armor as well as a real chopping block and axe that had been used together. I could see the axe marks on the wood of the chopping block, but there was no dried blood. The wooden horses were part of the Line of Kings, a thing that some king started, possibly Henry VIII, where each king’s horse was carved and stood next to a mannequin with that king’s armor and carved head. The horses were in pretty good condition, but the heads weren’t doing so well. Then we looked at two more floors of weapons and saw a display about Guy Fawkes Day. Guy Fawkes was part of a group of people who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605 (I know this because they’re circulating commemorative two pound coins for the 400th anniversary) but was discovered the day before it happened. With all of its leaders gone, England would have been a mess and would be nothing like it is today. It’s called Guy Fawkes Day because he was the one who was going to light the gunpowder that had been put under the Houses of Parliament. He was a freako Catholic terrorist just like some modern Muslim ones (think 9/11) and was mainly trying to get rid of the Anglican bishops.

After we finished in the White Tower (keep), we went to the Jewel House where the Crown Jewels are kept. We had to wait in line while watching videos of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation through like three rooms. Then we went through vault doors (were they real or just for the tourists?) and saw about ten scepters and some solid gold plates. There was also a coronation dress (I guess that’s what it’s called; it was a cross between a dress and big robes). We got on a people mover (flat escalator) thingie and passed the crowns. There were about ten of them, but the ones that stick out are Queen Victoria’s and Queen Elizabeth’s, as well as the crown used for all of the modern coronations. After we got off that, there were more gold dishes and a giant gold punch bowl about the size of a four-seater restaurant table. The ladle for the punch bowl was as tall as a cane and had a scoop as big as a soup bowl.

We went on the Tube to the London Eye and once again found rain to greet us. Thomas, my dad, and Cindy went on the Eye while the rest of us stayed on firm ground and had hot dogs and gelato. Notice that these are the same groups we divided into for the Empire State Building- the land dwellers and the observers. While the observers were on the London Eye, the land dwellers found my dad’s cousin who grew up in Scotland and last came to the US in ’93 at age seven. My mom was the only land dweller who had ever met him, but since he was a kid then she just started asking random guys. She found him after the fifth guess and we met him and waited for the observers to come off the Eye. Dinner followed at a nice Steak House next to Paddington Station, and then we had coffee and hot chocolate at the Paddington food court. Since the last train to Hungerford had been at 6.00pm, we had to take the 10.20 train to Reading and transfer to the last train to Hungerford. Except it turned out that we missed the transfer by ten minutes.

(dun dun dun duuuhhhh, dun dun dun duuuuhhhhhhh)

Stranded at the Reading train station at 11.00, both my mom and I thought deliriously that we would have to stay overnight at the station. Luckily my dad got us a taxi, except it was 65 pounds ($130) to get to Hungerford and he had already paid the full train fare to Hungerford. I also ended up in the worst seat in the taxi, a little flipdown seat kind of like at a baseball stadium. The only upside was that we didn’t have to walk the 10 minute walk on our sore, exploding feet from the train station to our house. We arrived at about 11.30 and were in bed at midnight. That morning I slept until 9.30, even with the sun shining through my almost nonexistent window shade for five hours.