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We woke up on Saturday, eager to head into London. The plan was to take the Marriott free airport shuttle the two miles to Heathrow, then catch the tube to downtown. We took a LONG time to get ready, and ended up in the lobby just after 10:30, and watched the shuttle just pulling out of the driveway. “Don’t worry”, we were told, “it runs every half hour”. As we sat down and pondered, it dawned on me that the urge to leave the car at the hotel (no parking fee) was about to cost us an hour or so on this end, plus probably another one on the return leg. We talked to the concierge, a delightful and cheerful woman, and asked about nearby tube stations with available parking. She provided us another tube map, and highlighted which stations she considered to be car-friendly. She gave us verbal directions to the two nearest stations, but we understood only the most general information from her. Full of false confidence and bravado, we took her map and notes, the GPS, and the van and set off. We drove less than 10 miles. Of course, we could not find any of the stations that she had directed us to, but I was not worried as London’s famous ‘Underground’ signs are well placed and very helpful. Sure enough, within 15 minutes we located signs directing us to a station, finally identifed as "Ruslip Gardens". Being Saturday, the parking was free! We marked our location on the GPS (and returned to this same station on the following day). The London tubes offer a one-day week-end ‘family pass’ at a discount of some sort, and we had somehow decided to purchase one. On that lonely Saturday, in a distant suburban tube station, we sat and read the directions and fumbled over the ticket vending machine for more than half an hour until a uniformed, middle-aged man appeared from nowhere and took mercy upon us. Our station is closed on Saturday, he explained. Buy three one-way tickets and then exchange them for a two pound refund at your destination station (which he verified for us would be both open and staffed). In a few moments, we were off. We obviously should have just paid the extra two pounds in the first place and been on our way.
We arrived at the Hyde Park station, and the line to exchange the ticket was huge. Somehow the couple of pounds became an undroppable issue, so we stuck it out and got our two pound refund and our silly week-end family pass. There was a little bakery located right in the underground station, so we bought a couple of warm sandwich rolls and sodas and headed up for a snack in the park. I slowly took note that the station was crowded with people elbow-to-elbow, many wearing matching outfits (I had guessed some kind of soccer tournment). Once upstairs we learned that that particular Saturday had been scheduled for London’s giant ‘Gay Pride’ parade and festivities. We took all the hoopla in stride, but later our tour bus was required to divert from its normal path and take several sidestreets. (Our bus driver spoke only broken English, and we were amused as he misunderstood the alternate routing directions given by his supervisor).
We took pictures from the outside, read the description in the AAA
book and the Rough guide, then We stopped and had more sandwiches, and walked our legs off. Around 7pm it was time to forget the bus, find a tube, and return back to Heathrow for a spin in the Marriott jacuzzi. The train retraced our morning route while we planned our day for tomorrow. We found the car and made our way back to Windsor, driving by the castle, closed at 9pm sunset. We decided on Chinese and found a take-away place near a BP. I filled the tank while they procured dinner, which we ate in the room and crashed in bed. We were exhausted, and giddy, and looking forward to our Sunday on our own in London. Just before bed, we realized that today had passed, without much fanfare, and was the 4th of July.
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Copyright, 1999, all rights reserved |
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Originally Written November 1999 |
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The
“underground” is actually elevated where we were in
London’s western outlying districts, and it was fun to look out
the train windows as the BBC offices and the boxy british duplexs
passed by. The trains were clean and organized and there are plenty
of different lines, more colors than my box of crayolas in 1st grade.
Our decision for this Saturday was to take the tube to the central
Hyde Park station, then ride one of those ‘on and off’
double decker tourist buses around London all day. We would learn the
city layout, walk a little, and take a lot of pictures from upstairs.
We would then come back on Sunday to “see the sights” on foot.
Buying
the tour ticket was a hoot, as we were greeted at the top of the
Hyde Park underground stairway by a flock of tourbus ticket salesman.
Maybe ‘pounced upon’ is a better term. Several men were
selling the tickets, so I assumed they were on commission. The
neatest part (to me) was that the one took our credit card, and
processed it without a hitch from the small system on his belt and a
nearby phone. Within 15 minutes we were fed a snack and sitting atop
a packed double-decker bus, heading for Picadilly circus. We rode
that bus, on and off, for the next five hours. The tour guide stories
are great, lots of little snippets about certain buildings. Of
course, the on-and-off feature is terriffic. We shot 2 full rolls of
film of city sites from the upper deck of those busses.
The
bus took us past Trafalgar square, Picadilly circus, the US Embassy,
of couse Big Ben and Parliment. Eventually it rolled out to the
Eastern side of London, past St James, the Tower of London, Tower
Bridge. They offered a discout ticket to some kind of tourist site
(seemed like an overblown wax museum to me) but we passed. We saw
huge lines of toursits queued up for tickets to this event and an
even longer line at the Tower of London.
voted
three-to-zero to skip it, too. We had seen plenty of ‘real’
ruins, and had several more ahead of us. Sadly, we did not get to go
inside of Westminster Abbey, due to the late hour. But we certainly
visited the outside of it and Buckingham palace (but skipped the
changing of the guards). We sought out “Cleopatra’s
needle” and were very let down to find it overrun with dozens of
teenagers, treating it like a jungle gym, all of them smoking and
dressed in fashionable black and fashionably made up in that modern
look that resembles vampires to anybody over the age of 30.
