Day 3: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

The author David Foster Wallace wrote an essay complaining about cruising the Caribbean from his usual smug position of "I'm too smart for this, and find it horribly unsettling" with this title. This title, and this attitude, strikes me as appropriate for the bus tour of Stonehenge and Bath that we took today.

Our tour began at 8:30 AM from Victoria Coach Station. After two hours of driving, we arrived at Stonehenge. Stonehenge is in an empty field in the middle of nowhere, and you get to walk around a path around the outside of the stones and hear about how the henge was probably made. There's barrow mounds nearby, and it is impressive to see the giant stones that were hauled for miles, shaped, and erected into massive uprights topped with lintels without the aid of wheels, proper stonemason tools, or draft animals, and the fact that the stones are secured with mortise and tenon joinery is remarkable for a 5,000 year old structure. However, there's maybe an hour and a half's worth of stuff to do including the visitor's center, and you're on a bus tour, so you've only got an hour to do it. This means you get out, wait for a shuttle to the henge, have a good look around with the audio guide, and get back on the bus.

We got to Bath at 1:30 PM, and after 45 minutes to grab a quick lunch, it was time to tour the Roman Baths at 2:15. Unfortunately, we needed to leave Bath at 4:30, and didn't get into the baths until closer to 2:30. The Roman Baths really should take more time than that, and we both felt uncomfortably rushed through the museum. The water that feeds the baths is a natural hot spring that comes from 10,000 year old rainwater being heated by natural geothermal heat, and has been used as such since pre-Roman times (local legend tells of a prince with something like leprosy who discovered the spring by observing his pigs bathing in it and emerging healthier). The museum is built over the ruins of the original Roman bath complex, and contains the best preserved bits, the original sacred spring amd overflow plumbing, a "king's bath" built in the 1700s as a spa for rich people, and the ruins of the Roman temple and bath complex. At the end of the museum, you get to taste the waters of the hot spring, which are warm, and taste like metal and sulfur. Allegedly, this stuff is good for you. By the time we had finished, it was too late for Alecia to visit the Jane Austen center (but not too late for Adam to find a pub), and the local baker had sold out of the local sweet bun things the tour guide mentioned.

After a 2.5 hour bus ride back to London, we went to Covent Garden, because Adam was determined to salvage the day. If Alecia couldn't indulge her sweet tooth with a Sally Lunn bun, she could indulge it with Ladurée macarons. Ladurée is a Parisian pastry shop world renowned for its macarons in exotic flavors like rose petal, violet blackcurrant, and chestnut, and they even make them covered in gold or silver leaf (we each had one of these, and they don't taste any different). After getting 6 more to go, and some dinner, we went back on the Tube to get back to the hostel. Incidentally, this happened to take us past King's Cross, so naturally we stopped by Platform 9-3/4 to take pictures. They take professional photos there, so we bought a copy of the picture we took of both of us to frame in the apartment.

Tomorrow will be Camden Market, West End theater, and either Brick Lane or Hyde Park Winter Wonderland.

Day 2: Ancient Powers

After sleeping for 12 hours and having breakfast, we went on a walking tour of the eastern half of London. This mostly covered the City of London, which is a square mile along the Thames that is the oldest part of the city. The Romans founded their civitas of Londinium here. The Great Fire began here. St. Paul's Cathedral is here. Europe's financial sector is controlled from here... for now. It's a jumble of centuries old buildings full of historic character and establishments right next to ultra-modern steel and glass towers, some of which have an unfortunate propensity for  melting car parts.

After we finished the tour, we walked back to the Tower of London, but were too late for a Yeoman Warder tour. We will save that for the 27th. Instead, we took the tube to Westminster, and toured Westminster Abbey. St. Paul's may be the biggest church in London, but Westminster Abbey must be the most important. It is the ornate church where royalty is crowned and wed, and where great Britons lie buried or memorialized. Shakespeare is buried here in "Poet's Corner", beside Dickens, Milton, Jane Austen, Handel, and TS Elliot. Isaac Newton lies near Lord Kelvin, James Maxwell, Dirac, and Darwin. Queen Elizabeth I, and many other monarchs are interred here, along with Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who founded Scouting. This church is more a monument to England's legends than anything.

After a brief detour to Trafalgar Square, we returned to the city of London for some dinner and drinks. Drinks were had at a tavern called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which has been in operation since 1538, and has existed in its present form since 1667, when it was rebuilt after the fire. Writers like Dickens, Ben Johnson, Tennyson, and Mark Twain are all known to have dined and drank there frequently. Today, it is a Samuel Smith's pub, which means pints of Old Brewery Bitter are £3.10, and so what would be a tourist trap anywhere else is frequented by locals and tourists alike.

Dinner wound up being at a nearby bar called Ye Olde Cock, which was selected because it had open tables, and a name that drew giggles. Alecia got a steak and ale pie (despite being on Fleet Street, we are fairly certain no human flesh was involved), and Adam got fish and chips. Ye Olde Cock had existed as a business since 1549, and indeed Alfred, Lord Tennyson had written poems about hanging out there, but the current building dates from 1887, and is across the street from the original. Both were tasty and very filling.

Tomorrow is a day trip to Stonehenge and Bath.

Day 1: Time Keeps On Slippin'

Ahhhh time. The first day of any international vacation East or West, you are entirely at its mercy. You have travelled through it to a world where 6AM is the new midnight, and now it is going to make you pay for daring to move so fast. All you can do is struggle to stay awake until a "reasonable" hour in your new time zone, so that you can finally be on time.

The activity we chose to keep us on time today was quite literally time. The prime meridian runs through Greenwich, and so we decided to pay the observatory where they figured out how to deal with not getting wrecked on an East/West journey a visit. Last time I was in London, my mom and I tried to go, but my mom wanted to get there via riverboat cruise, and so we did not arrive in time to tour the observatory.

This time, we used light rail, including the  Heathrow Express, and got there in time to see the observatory. The observatory has many of the old telescopes they used to make incredibly accurate star charts (which could be used to find longitude based on what time a star appeared at a given angle in the sky), and the early ship's clocks that were invented to keep London time without pendulums (which don't work on storm-tossed ships). Both of these were used to figure out longitude, and form an important precursor to GPS, which works off many of the same principles.

After all that wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, it was time for dinner. We happened upon the nearby Greenwich Market, which was comprised of a lot of craft vendors, and a lot of food stalls. Most of these were closing for the day, but that meant that an Ethiopian stall sold us a veggie dinner and a meat dinner for a grand total of £8. And they say London is expensive...

After the best Ethiopian food we've ever had, we went to a pub for some beer. Two pints set us back £8.65. Last time I was here, that would have been horrifically expensive. Thanks to the crashing pound, that's about $11-$12. Not bad at all, really. Thanks, Brexit!

Unfortunately, food, beer, and jetlag combine to put you out of commission, so it's time for bed.

Day 13: Park Güell

On our last day, we went up to Park Güell to see the last Gaudi site in Barcelona. Wealthy industrialist Eusebi Güell commissioned Gaudi to design a subdivision for 60 wealthy families on a mountain side. Gaudi came up with suitably wacky entrances and public walking paths, but only two houses were built on the estate, as it turns out that people don't like hiking up a mountainside every single day. The public spaces were built, and in 1925, Barcelona received it as a walking park. Gaudi's work here is inside the Monument Zone, for which advance tickets should be booked (only 400 are available per half hour). If you don't get them (which you should, they're €7), you can see everything at a distance from outside the gates and only miss the colonnade of the washer woman, and the hipostyle room underneath the Nature Plaza. If you fail at even that, just go to the City Museum. Park Güell's curving lines and crushed tile mosaics are straight out of the mind of Bob Cassily  (though Cassily is really out of the mind of Gaudi, as he worked some 70 years later). We saw everything but the most ornate mosaics in the hypostile room, which were under renovation, but that's Europe for ya.

And with that, our trip to Spain has come to a close. Tomorrow we have a bunch of awful flights, and get home to snuggle the cat at around 11PM.