this trip's overview

Gran Canaria portion

First Day Back

Man-made Finery

Queen's Life Guard

Covent Garden Markets

London's Transport Museum I

Marks & Spencers

Natural History Museum

Science Museum

High Street Kensington

Bus Karma I

The Strand

Simpsons-in-the-Strand

Tower of London

Science Museum II

Worst Food Ever

Where the shops are

Neal's Yard Dairy

Seven Dials

Bus Karma II

returning home

Wednesday 5 February 2003

It's 2200, and the family is finally asleep. The bags are packed; half last evening, half this morning, three per cent this evening, three per cent tomorrow morning :-) The minicab has been scheduled for 0700; it'll be Jack, the Montenegran driver who brought us from the airport last week.

I'm back at Le Savoir Faire, enjoying the mussels in garlic and pernod butter. I'm just getting used to being in London, and it's time to go home. One week is never enough for me. I'd probably be a terrible 21-cities-in-19-days kind of traveller.

There have been several frustrations for me on this leg of our trip. First and foremost, the girls club have been fighting some travellers flu, one after the other. And when Rose is ill things are triply more difficult for me. The driving winds have made the cold weather more unpaletable to the little ones, which limited our choices of sight-seeing. Lastly, for the last thirty-six hours I've been fighting the same travellers flu, but it seems to be all gone now.

The upsides have been all that we love in London. The accents, the people, the architecture and history and food. There is so much we've enjoyed even with all our hinderances. All things considered I prefer London with temperate weather.

Okay, enough for the summary. What did we do today, on our last day? We started out late, having finished packing our three duffel bags. (Packing is the most stressful part of any trip for me, and doing it in the wee hours of the last night is just terrible. Rose has been absolutely great in making it easy for me to pack in stages, and to avoid that aggravation. Thanks, honey.)

Rose really likes the bus system, despite our misadventure a few evenings ago and her bad bus karma from previous trips, so I agreed to take the No. 19 from our front door to Knightsbridge.

We got lucky, and were able to ride on an old Route Master bus. These have an open-air entryway in the rear, and the beautiful metal workings around the windows. (The modern replacement bus is butt ugly, without any flair or class to them at all. An damned shame that such a wonderful look is being tossed out.)

Unfortunately, Rose's bus karma continues to haunt us. It takes about ten or fifteen minutes to move the three blocks to the Tottenham Court Road Underground stop (because of some alleged road-work, which we don't see). Once through the intersection, we speed along for at least a dozen meters before screeching to a halt, and the stop-and-go continues for another ten minutes until we've made it to Picadilly Circus. (Mind you, this is a walk that we can do in about six minutes all told. We've been on that bus almost a half-hour. Grrr.)

We jump off the bus in order to switch to the Tube. That's when Rose says "did you take the hats"? I run behind the buss, now going herky-jerky down the street. Thanks to the rear platform entry I'm able to make a flying leap, get aboard, run up the tiny curved stairway to the upper deck, run to the first set of seats, grab the hats, and make a running leap off the bus before it's gone too far away. I'm back with the ohana in two minutes.

Above you see a family moment, as we're speedily on our way to Harrod's of Knightsbridge.

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