8:30 am - We left the hotel and stopped by the Murco offices to leave the scales I borrowed to check weight daily. We walked next door to the train station and train for London arrived at 9:30. It took about 25 minutes to ride to the King's Cross station in London where we changed to the Tube (subway) to go to downtown London. On the train and in the station, we were obviously puzzled several times and kind souls -- perhaps angels in disguise -- helped us get pointed in the right direction. We made it to Charing Cross station near Trafalgar Square before 11:00. Charing Cross reminds us of a poem by English poet Francis Thompson, (probably best known for his poem The Hound of Heaven) that is often quoted by Ravi Zacharias. It is called The Kingdom of God.
We stopped at a McDonalds for coffee, free restrooms and to get our bearings. Finally, after having to regroup several times (partly due to bewildering unfamiliarity with the streets and an illegible map) we found the tour bus office about noon. Given the time of day and the short time we had until we had to get back to King's Cross station (we had arranged with John's English cousins to meet there for get-acquainted dinner), the tour manager suggested we pick one stop on the tour to get off and take a long look at. We chose to do that at the Tower of London. At last, after all our time in the UK, we got to look up-close at a castle and we probably couldn't have had a better one to see. John took lots of pictures.
My favorite things were the those which Joseph and I studied in homeschool. I could identify the arrow loops, the moat (which is now drained and has a skating rink), the portcullis and so on. We had a non-guided tour rather than one led by a yeoman in uniform (you can see some of them in one of the pictures) but it was fascinating and wonderful. Of course, my favorite thing to see were the displays about the crown jewels. They had crowns that had been worn by several monarchs through the centuries.
There was a lot of climbing -- the towers that were built at various places along the wall used circular stairways a lot -- so were unable to take it ALL in but we saw a lot of it, much dating back to the 12th century. We were well worn by what we did get to see. Then we had a long wait for the tour bus to come and take us back to Trafalgar Square, where we again went to Charing Cross and took the Tube back to King's Cross to meet the cousins. None of us knew each other by sight, so we held up a ROWLAND sign and Ian Whyte, one of Keith Whyte's sons spotted us and connected us up with the rest. So our dinner party consisted of John and I, Keith and his wife Joan and two sons, Ian and Chris plus Keith's sister Marian.
We walked about 10 minutes to a pub, but they were not going to be serving dinner until later than we could wait, so Ian went back to the main street and found the Acorn House restaurant, came and got us and we all walked over there. We had a wonderful meal together. Keith's son Ian works in IT consulting and his son Chris works for the City of London and has recently become the personal assistant to the Lord Mayor of London. He brought us some booklets about the Lord Mayor and about the Lord Mayor's home, which is somewhat of a landmark. I had a good talk with Marian about her interests, her volunteer work and family. When we finished and had taken some pictures, they all escorted us back to the train platform and stayed with us until our train came and we left the station for St Albans.
On the ride back to St Albans we were standing (this train was crowded -- standing room only) next to a woman who struck up a conversation with us. She was quite an interesting person -- a London police detective on the murder squad for about 30 years. She is an Agatha Christie fan like myself and has been to the US skiing at various places. We exchanged email addresses and she is going to look for some hard to find Agatha Christie short stories and get them for me. We got back to the St Albans station about 9:00 pm and took a cab back to the hotel. After we had a night cap of hot cocoa and hot Horlicks malt drink, we finalized our packing and fell into bed.
See pictures here
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