London - Day 9

We had saved the last day of our trip to do any of the things that we had missed.  It was a good thing to do and we ended up filling it from beginning to end.  I had wanted to visit a shop that said it was in London, but ended up being a 30 minute ride on the Overground line from where we were.  It's called The Who Shop and is a store that sells only Dr. Who stuff and I had read that it had a museum as well.  

Not my picture...didn't remember to take one when we got there...

It was bit...underwhelming.  We found fun stuff and we dropped a lot of money, don't get me wrong, but it was a lot of stuff that you could have found online.  I tried to get stuff I hadn't seen in the U.S., but it was also really overpriced.  Kind of a let down after the awesomeness of Harry Potter.  I never saw any indication of a museum, though on the flyer they slipped in our bags it said there was one, and you couldn't take any pictures in the store.  They did have two full size TARDISes (TARDi?) and they were quite a bit bigger than I had imagined they would be (on the outside as well as inside).  On our way back to the tube station we passed the West Ham football stadium (can you name the Harry Potter reference?  Anyone?).  

We tubed it back to Kings Cross and went to the bookstore that was next to the Platform 9 3/4 store from yesterday.  Since we thought that it was going to be too heavy to bring back all of the Harry Potter books (along with all the other's I'd already bought) we had only picked up our favorites at the WB Studio.  I had seen that there was an Internet address on the back and figured we could buy the other books that way and send them home.  When I'd tried that last night we found out they wouldn't ship them to the U.S.  Boo!  :(  But I had seen that that bookstore was selling the books with the new covers on them.  

We also each picked up one of the cutest bags I had seen yet on our trip.  Mom figured at this point we needed to get another suitcase to get everything home.  We once again had bought souvenirs and things that we had wanted like we were driving home not flying.  It's our usual problem.  So we walked over to St.Pancras station and got another carry-on size suitcase.  They were of course really expensive because they were there at the station, but we didn't want to go hunting for cheaper ones.  Taking our loot back to the room we then headed off for the next Dr. Who related thing I wanted to see before we left which was the last blue police box in London.  It's at the entrance to the Earl's Court Underground station.  When we got off the tube and out on the street there wasn't anything there.  I had noticed by now that there are multiple entries into the tube at any one station so we walked around the block to the opposite entrance.  There it was!  Tucked in beside a magazine stand with everyone walking around oblivious to it's presence.  

What's that next to the stand?

Right there...

We took pictures and some guy was going to come up and lean his bike against it, but then saw we were taking pictures.  Do you think that it was only visible to us and everyone else was wondering why we were taking pictures of something so normal?  The TARDIS does have a perception filter which makes it unnoticeable to people who aren't looking for it, but visible to those who are.  Hmmmm.  At that point we were famished again and I had really wanted to have one nice tea at a fancy place.  My choice was the Orangery at Kensington Palace.  It was a nice stroll through the parks around the palace on the way to the Orangery and it was amazing to notice as you got deeper into the park how you couldn't hear the loud busyness of the city.  I was also surprised at the fact that it had been so loud for so long and I hadn't noticed until it was quiet.  The Orangery was beautiful and the tea so elegant.  We used china patterned after the Queen's own china and just like the tea cups that we bought at the Tower.  It was so good that I forgot to take a picture of the three tier set of plates with goodies on them again!  Every time we have tea I forget to do it!!  I think it's probably because we are so hungry that we just dive in.  So you'll have to imagine while I describe it.  On the bottom were the sandwiches, four of them, cut into triangles and filled with egg salad and cress, cucumber and mint, smoked salmon and cream cheese, and a chicken salad called coronation chicken.  Mom knew by this point that she was "allergic" to smoked salmon and discretely asked when we ordered if she could have something other than salmon.  In reality she just despised it.  On the second tier were the scones, cut with a biscuit cutter so they were round and had sultanas in them.  They came with clotted cream (which was really tasty and has a texture somewhere between butter and cream cheese) and strawberry jam.  On the top tier were the sweets.  A tart filled with lemon curd, a small dark chocolate and raspberry cake, meringue topped with a strawberry, another tart with a more citrus-y filling and two pieces of Victoria sponge cake.  At the cake I remembered I hadn't taken any pictures, so that's what you get.  

It was delicious and so filling.  After tea we wandered through the park to Kensington Palace and took pictures, but from only the outside.  

I also had the thought that Kate was in there somewhere sick as a dog because she's pregnant for the second time.  News reports said she was being treated at Kensington Palace and hadn't been sent to the hospital yet.  If there is something that I regret it is not getting to go into any of the palaces or museums.  We just didn't have time.  Did we spend too much of it on the tube going places?  Or walking?  Could I have timed things better or should we have done fewer excursions?    Probably yes to all of it, but now there is a reason to go back.  Like I said earlier in these posts, you become numb to the beauty of it and maybe it just wouldn't have been appreciated this time around.  After walking through the park we went out to catch one of the Original Bus tours of London.  I had bought the tickets online before we left and thought that we would use them the day we got there.  We didn't want to waste the money so we went and found a bus and got on.  I was bemoaning the fact that we would spend our last hours doing that instead of something better, but it was a pretty awesome way to end the trip.  

Herrods

Apsley House, or Number One London

Piccadilly Circus

Parliament...

On those tours you sit on the top level in the open air and get to enjoy the beauty of the buildings and your surroundings.  Walking the street you never look up and marvel at the magnificence above you.  You are too busy trying to navigate the sea of people coming at you.  On those buses you do nothing but look up.  We passed by every place we had been to and got to drive over the Tower Bridge, instead of just look at it from afar.  

Dragons mark the boundary of the city of London (as opposed to the city of Westminster)

St. Paul's Cathedral...

Monument to the Great Fire of London
If it fell over it would land on the spot where the fire started

Is falling down, falling down...

Mom said it was like on Survivor when you get down to the final three and they make them do a hike where all the snuffed torches of the people that had been voted off are along the route and they are supposed to do this moving tribute to those that had gone before them.  That's what our bus tour was, the tribute to all the places we'd seen and those we wished we could have had time to see. 

Cleopatra's Needle

It was getting later and later in the evening and the sun was setting.  It was really beautiful and moving...and cold.  We were huddled together trying to stay warm and Mom was using the map as a blanket like a homeless person.  I'd stick my hand in my armpit every so often to warm it up.  We looked at the map and thought we'd get out at Tower Hill to catch a tube home, but we missed the stop because we thought there'd be another.  Finally we passed a tube stop and the bus stopped so we hoped off, right down at Westminster, the Parliament building and Big Ben and the light was so amazing.  Maybe that's why we ended up on there a longer time than we'd hoped to be, just to get some more awesome pictures.  

We took the tube from Westminster back to Kings Cross on the Circle line, which was a little longer than usual.  But happily someone had left behind a London Evening Standard and we read the paper and managed to still get off at the correct stop making us true Londoners indeed.  Dinner was one last stop at Pret a Manger for me.  I'm really going to miss those, they have excellent healthy take away.  We made it back to our place around 8 PM.  I'd been hoping to get home closer to 4 or 5 because we still needed to pack.  But first I ran up and grabbed the papers so that we could check in to our Air Canada flight and get the boarding passes.  The lady behind the desk said that they usually don't allow it until 9, but she'd make an exception.  Wow.  Thanks.  So I got our boarding passes for the first leg of our journey, but it wouldn't be "24 hours" before our flight from Seattle to Yakima until 2 am.  We had asked earlier whether we could print them in the morning but the lady behind the desk at that time said no.  I was going to check us in when I got up regardless, but it would be nice to have the printed tickets.  So we headed upstairs, ate our last meal in London, watched the Great British Bake-off (which is pretty addicting!) and packed.  What mayhem!  The problem was getting into our carry-ons what we needed to declare to have the VAT taken off.  VAT is a 20% tax on all items sold in Britain.  We had been told at one store that we didn't need to get forms at the stores to have the VAT taken off our purchases, but at another store they had the forms there so I got one.  Rick Steves said that your purchase needed to be above 30 pounds so we got together everything that was a large purchase and fit them into our carry-ons.  With that accomplished the next task was getting everything else into our suitcases.  I think one of the carry-on sized bags that we checked was filled with mostly books.  My suitcase was crazy.  I had brought some of those space bags and put all my clean clothes in one, but then didn't think another would be helpful with trying to pack the rest of my stuff and clothes.  I rolled the rest of the shirts and folded the pants and got everything in, but it looked like a mountain and there would be no way to close it.  And I still hadn't gotten my bathroom stuff in.  So things started getting cut at that point.  If I didn't really need it then it got left behind.  In the end I had to leave my travel hair dryer, though that wasn't such a hardship as it was really too hot when I would blow dry my hair.  It even set off the fire alarm one morning (after the toast incident) so I took to drying my hair next to an open window.  We did get the suitcase closed, after opening the extender, and prayed that it wasn't over weight.  By the time we were all packed up it was 11:00 PM.  We needed to be up at 3 AM.  Seriously.  So we threw ourselves into bed and tried and tried and tried to go to sleep.  I had checked my cellular roaming charges and saw that they were at 9.6 KB.  In my sleep deprived and slightly panicked state I thought that a KB was more than a MB and that my cell phone bill was going to be in the thousands of dollars from going over.  Not that it won't be huge, I'm sure, but just not that high.  After figuring out my mistake (thank you Google!) I fell to sleep.  But Mom said that she didn't get to sleep until after midnight because she heard the bells ring out.  Always try to end it with a bang!

Fun Observation of the Trip - People who live somewhere you travel to often want to travel to where you live.  You each think the other has it better, but really it's just a hand off of one set of problems for another.  Londoners like to conform.  Everyone dresses the same, the houses are all similar, no one stands out.  I'm not sure why that is but it seems a bit socialist.  We were also glad that we were leaving before the voting that is happening at the end of the week.  Scotland has decided they want independence and at the time we left it was a 50-50 split for yes versus no.  I'm pretty sure that there will be upset people no matter which was it goes, so I'm glad to be out of there.  (Hooray!  They voted to stay!)