We started our day the healthy way, with a banana.
And a trip on the tube to... drumroll... our ninth Monopoly street!
We started our sightseeing for the day watching the changing of the horse guards.
There's a lake in the nearby gardens, and this gorgeous little cottage.
From there, we walked down to the Churchill Museum, situated in Winston Churchill's World War II bunker near Downing St.
Most of it remains in the same condition it was in when the war ended.
Churchill apparently spent a lot of his time in this onesie made of dressing-gown material, sleeping in it and conducting meetings from his bed in it.
The little kitchen set up for Churchill and his wife...
He was a very attractive man, wasn't he?
From there it was a fairly short walk to Westminster Abbey. We got to marvel at the giant chandeliers visible through the upper windows we passed along the way.
I was quite amazed at how small the abbey actually felt inside. It looked a lot bigger in the footage of the recent royal wedding, I thought!
No photos inside, I'm afraid, but we did take this one in the courtyard outside. Still gloomy and rainy, the way London is supposed to be.
I know it seems crazy to be rejoicing in the less-than-cheerful weather, but we would probably have been disappointed if London didn't at least give us a sample of what the weather is supposed to be like most of the time! It also made traveling in the tube much more pleasant. It gets pretty awful in there with no air conditioning when its' hot.
Speaking of the tube, when we emerged from the abbey we decided to protect our feet a bit by catching the tube back towards Trafalgar Square, where we had arranged to meet yet another friend from the cruise.
Not before Tom found Abraham Lincoln again...
There is no direct tube line between Westminster Abbey and Trafalgar Square, so it probably took us more time and effort than it might have taken to just walk there. Nevertheless, we made it, and went to a lovely little pub for a traditional English pub lunch.
We then made a fantastic discovery. Our day tube pass covered travel on red buses as well! We hopped on a bus that took us straight down The Strand to Saint Paul's Cathedral. We loved it. There was a choir inside rehearsing for a concert which certainly heightened the beauty of the experience, but it's a truly lovely cathedral. Beautifully decorated, but in a kind of understated way that makes you really appreciate the special-ness of it.
No photos allowed inside (although of course there were other tourists snapping photos all over the place - grrrr), but we decided to climb the stairs to see the view from the dome. 550 stairs to be exact! The view was pretty great, though.
This was through a particularly dirty window on the way back down again...
The sun decided to shine for a few minutes again once we reemerged at the bottom...
They have these giant reflective balls at the entrance to the walking bridge across the river (the one we saw through the window of the Tate Modern the previous day)
We made our way straight to the Globe Theatre this time, on foot. I did not look at this bike enviously.
We were hoping to do the tour of the Globe (which we'd missed out on yesterday because we'd run out of time). Very sadly, they were completely closed for tours that day, because they had performances scheduled to use the theatre. We were very disappointed.
It's a great gate, but it's not that good as a consolation prize.
We managed to get over it eventually, and walked back across the bridge and hopped on a bus back towards Trafalgar Square.
We passed Australia House on the way...
That's when we encountered Hiccup Number Two. The bus turned at a bridge before we got to Trafalgar Square and crossed the river. Our own fault for not being able to read the bus timetable quickly enough before boarding. So we accepted our fate and crossed the road to catch the tube back to Trafalgar from Waterloo station.
I don't get Monopoly points for making reference to ABBA songs, do I?
Once we'd eventually made it back to Trafalgar Square we assessed whether we could allow ourselves enough time to actually go inside the National Gallery there. We decided we simply couldn't manage it this time around. We did get to see some 'living' artwork outside though...
We started walking in the general direction of our hotel, hoping to encounter a bus route that could take us there a bit easier than catching the tube.
I got a tiny bit excited when we walked past The Ritz, thinking of it in the movie Notting Hill (I'm really going for the super cool memories in London, aren't I?)...
We found a bus, and thought we were incredibly clever reading timetables this time and switching lines when we needed to near the palace. Another bus arrived almost immediately after we switched, it said 'Marble Arch', so we jumped on.
And so we created Hiccup Number Three. I'll get to that in a minute.
Along the way, Tom spotted Harrods. He really wanted to get out and look in there for some new fancy jeans. I was worried that we didn't have enough time, because we were booked to go to another show that night with yet more friends from the cruise ship. So, Tom decided to hop out on his own, while I made my own way back to our hotel to shower.
This created Hiccup Number Four.
And now for the story behind those last two hiccups! Hiccup Number Three occurred because London buses (like many buses in Europe) advertise both where they've come from and where they are going. We saw Marble Arch in lights at the front of the bus, and concluded that that was the place the bus was going. You see where this is headed?
Well I did eventually realise where the bus was headed, when the announcement came that the next stop was the Victoria and Albert Museum. A long way away from Marble Arch. So far away in fact, that despite the fact that we'd wanted to see it, we hadn't been able to squeeze it in.
I at least took advantage of the unforeseen opportunity and snapped some pictures of anything monumental-looking that I could see.
And then I went into panic mode. Because Hiccup Number Four reared its ugly head then - Tom had got out of the bus at Harrods, and taken both our metro tickets (that also stand in as bus tickets) with him. The only thing I had on me apart from a half-used tissue in my pocket was our camera. Not going to help me buy another bus ticket, and there was no way I was going to walk/run all the way to Marble Arch from Kensington!
So, I crossed the road, read, re-read and re-re-read the bus timetable, memerised the bus numbers that would take me to Marble Arch (never say I don't learn from my mistakes) at the nearest bus stop, and waited feverishly for the next bus. Fortunately it was one of my memerised numbers, so I boarded. I then proceeded to babble my story at fever pitch to the poor bus driver, who probably let me stay on board just so I would stop squeaking at him. Thank goodness that the male response to a girl on the verge of tears is to make the problem go away in the least confrontational manner possible! Thank you kind bus driver!
I got myself back to the hotel and showered and dressed, and then had a very panicked wait for Tom to show up. He had had similar issues navigating his way back, found himself at Kensington, and ended up running almost all the way from there.
Craziness. We then had the issue that we were already running late to meet our friends outside the theatre, and we only had about 20 minutes to actually get ourselves to the theatre before the show was due to start.
Are you braced for Hiccup Number Five?
We were relying on the address of the theatre being on the ticket printout we had. It wasn't. So we arrived at the tube stop, jumped on board a train heading in the rough direction of Covent Garden, and asked anyone willing to talk to us which stop they thought we should get off at. We followed their guidance, still having no idea where the actual theatre was, and repeated our question to anyone we saw on the street. We then ran about two suburbs (or at least the equivalent of about two tube stops), to where we eventually found the theatre.
We must have looked like lunatics. We certainly felt like them!
I'd like to add that, for good measure, I had decided to wear the same shoes that attempted to murder my feet in Paris, the day we went to the Louvre. Stupid, I know, but I hadn't anticipated that a night at the theatre would involve running a marathon. My bad.
Anyway, most importantly, we made it. With about three minutes to spare. We climbed into our seats, drank about three bottles of water each, and tried not to perspire all over the people next to us.
We could hardly believe we'd actually managed it, after... what was it... FIVE hiccups in one afternoon?
The show was fantastic. If you weren't able to figure out what show we were seeing from the subject of this post, you need to get watching your Disney movies! The Lion King was hugely different from War Horse, the previous night, (despite also being animal-oriented) but really great fun!
Here we are, hot, breathless and excited.
To top it all off, our friends from the cruise (who very sweetly forgave us for being so late), took us to a nearby Thai restaurant (to round off our multicultural London food experience) and we had a lovely meal together.
All's well that ends well, right? Hakuna Matata! And goodbye London!
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