And finally, London (part 1)

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

-William Wordsworth

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

We departed Paris on the Eurostar, the cleanest, most comfortable, relaxing and FAST train that takes you under the English Channel -- my new favorite way to travel! After 5 countries, it was a relief to find and successfully transfer into our last AirBnb. We've had great experience with this all summer, but it still makes me a little nervous every time to show up at a location hoping we're in the right place and there will be a way for us to get in.  After typical settling in stuff, we rested and relaxed, saving up energy for the last leg of our adventure.

The next morning, we caught an Original Tour double-decker bus for a hop-on hop-off guided tour of all the main sights. We hopped off at Buckingham Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard with a few thousand of our tourist friends. After standing outside at the gates waiting for about 45 minutes, a representative from the palace came out to tell us there would not be a changing that day. We never figured out why not or why they couldn't communicate that to the gathered crowds sooner, but oh well.

We walked from there to the Churchill War Rooms. The Whitehall bunker/command-center of the British World War II effort has been converted into a FABULOUS museum. Everyone loved it. It's hands on, interactive and really gives you a feel for the man Churchill, warts and all. It's no wonder he's so revered still today; he truly was remarkable. (And quotable! Some of our favorites: "We are all worms, but I do believe that I'm a glow worm." "In war, you don't have to be nice, you only have to be right," and "Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile. You do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it over the head.")

We hopped back on our bus tour in a light rain. Not an ideal setting to sit on the open top where you can get a good view, but we made the best of it. It's a great way to get a slow orientation to London and a feel for the city. The tour guides are funny and knowledgeable. We hopped back off at Trafalgar Square and toured the National Gallery. It's a wonderful collection of art and felt like a review of every period and museum we've visited throughout the summer. Highlights include Van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait" Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin of the Rocks," landscapes by native artists Constable and Turner, more Impressionist greats including Van Gogh's "Sunflowers." We finished the Double Decker tour and took a taxi home for a cozy dinner in the rain.

We joined the Saturday crowds at Portabello Street Market and thoroughly enjoyed looking through vintage clothing, English antiques, and fussy "bric-a-brac." We found an awesome plaid sport coat fitting for Cory's Scottish heritage and a leather miniature drawing pad for Isaac. When the rain started, we escaped into a traditional "Chippie" for proper English fish and chips and mushy peas.

A rainy afternoon leant itself perfectly to a tour of the British Library. A collection of what in my opinion is Britain's greatest artistic contribution to the world -- literature. We saw many gorgeous and ancient early Bibles, including a first edition Tyndale. Tyndale was a hero of my dad's, making this item even more poignant for me. The Magna Carta is on display here along with journals and written manuscripts from the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. The music collection includes Handel's Messiah score, Chopin's Militaire Polonaise, and of course early Beatles' lyrics scribbled out on scrap paper -- another link to Dad. Our return on the Metro landed us next door to a haircut salon. Isaac has been begging for a haircut so we decided here at least, he'd be able to explain what he wanted in his own language. He did have a little trouble translating inches into centimeters.

We were all excited to attend church this week in a language everyone understood. It turned out to be a very American Ward. Every person that uttered a word in Sacrament Meeting did so with an American accent, from the speakers to the Bishopric, to the prayers. I guess this ward attracts a lot of students, Professors, and the like. After church and dinner, we took an evening walk to the nearby and beautiful Holland Park. We love the devoted green spaces of Europe. This park is just as I always have imagined the English countryside...dense, shady, woodsy growth, interspersed with manicured, picturesque, formal gardens. We wandered for about an hour enjoying one picturesque view after another.

In the morning, Anna popped out of bed for the first time this summer without a lot of convincing. It was Harry Potter's birthday! We took the train to Leavesden, home of the Harry Potter Studio Tour...the place where the magic of the movies mostly happened. The day got off to a bad start. We left our backpack on the train. We realized it almost immediately, but discovered that bureaucracy is alive and well in Britain. Cory ran back to the train station. They told him that the station is run by the government, while the trains are run by a private company so they aren't allowed to just radio the train and let them know to pick up our stuff from the exact seat and car where we knew we had left it. They gave us a list of the company's phone numbers. Cory started calling and discovered most of the numbers didn't actually work. Eventually he spoke to someone who said, "Yeah, those numbers are wrong." Armed with the right numbers we learned that the private train company contracts with a separate third-party company for lost items. We had to submit an online form detailing exactly what was gone and then maybe in a week we'd hear back from them! (Ultimately, after a few more days of contact, we gave up the items as permanently lost.) So the day to the Studio had suddenly gotten quite a bit more expensive. In addition to the lunch we'd packed so we wouldn't have to buy overpriced studio food, we lost 2 jackets that we've dragged all through 90-degree Europe just so we could have them here where we need them, an umbrella, and Anna's carry-on backpack. Despite the frustration, we told ourselves to take a deep breath, and remember this is all just "stuff." Luckily nothing more important like passports or credit cards had been in the backpack.

The Studio Tour was magical enough to help us forget our bad morning. Anna, our Potter fanatic, was in absolute heaven. We walked around props, sets, exhibits, graphic art, etc. for most of the day without sitting down and the girl who can hardly manage an hour in a museum never sat down once or complained. (Except for maybe a minute when we forced her to walk through the awesome set of Aragog, the giant spider.)  It really is astounding to get up close and personal and see the amount of detail devoted to even the tiniest aspects of the films. It must have been a dream job for creative types for the 10 years of filming. We learned fun details about how the special effects worked along with inside-knowledge, behind-the-scenes lore. For example, many of the portraits in the scenes of Hogwarts Castle are portraits of actual production staff and their families. And, in Ollivanders' Wand Shop, there are 3000+ actual wand boxes on the set, each with the name of someone who worked on the movies. Anna's favorite display was all about the animals used for the films, with pictures of every "Fang, Crookshanks, Scabbers, and Hedwig" along with bios on the animals' temperaments and specialties. The magic was all capped off with butter beer, a trip to the gift shop and when we got home, some take-home Indian food from the local curry shop.

The next day was one of those where we went hard all day to squeeze in as much as possible. We started with the Tower of London. One of the oldest historical buildings left in London after fires, plagues, blitzes, and modernization, it's served as castle, fortress, prison, and execution site through the centuries. We spent time on a Beefeater tour -- those guys in the crazy yeoman get-ups who are actually all retired-with-distinction British Servicemen (and one woman). Our guide was fun and made sure no tourist in our group will ever confuse the difference between the Tower Bridge and London Bridge. We walked through towers to look at armor, weapons, carved horses, and modern recreations of torture devices (ick). We also got to see the Crown Jewels (sparkly!) and were walked through the coronation process (yawn). One of our favorite things were the ravens that are tended on the grounds as a centuries-old superstition that the castle will fall if there are no ravens inside. Some crazy guy even risked his life during the blitz to bring in some spares from the zoo when they were down to the last one. We all could have spent another hour, but we were hungry and needed to move on to the next stop.

We picked up lunch to go and relaxed on the Thames River Cruise while we ate, touring the Bankside sites on our way to Westminster Pier. When we arrived, we took a walk through Westminster from the Pier to Trafalgar Square. What used to be a separate Abbey-focused town outside London, this has now become the political center of the city and the country. Home to Parliament, Big Ben (name of the bell, not the clock), Number 10 Downing Street, the Horse Guards, Government offices, and finally Admiral Horatio Nelson's monument. After our walking tour, we headed back down to Westminster Abbey and got there just in time to witness a demonstration being held in front of Parliament. We watched for a minute, then went to the abbey where we got in about 15 minutes before they stopped allowing visitors. Phew! Just in the nick of time!

The Abbey is beautiful, and I only wish we could take pictures inside. The carved stone ceiling of the "Lady Chapel" alone was as stunning as anything we've seen in cathedrals throughout Europe. Westminster is the resting/monument place of many royals, (Edward the Confessor, Queen Elizabeth I) scientists, (Newton, Darwin) philosophers, and of course eminent English writers and poets in "Poets' Corner" (Chaucer, Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, Dickens). It even has a bit of melodrama to its history, having been used as a symbol in religious and state power struggles over the centuries. Cromwell was buried here for a few years until the Monarch was reinstated and his body was exhumed, hanged, drawn, quartered, and decapitated. Elizabeth I's extravagant tomb is here, but when her nephew became King, he created an equally ornate tomb for his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had executed. We finished our tour and then stuck around to enjoy Evensong. Although the Westminster Boys' Choir is out for the summer, a visiting Boys' Choir from the Netherlands sang the service beautifully. I think it would be hard to sound bad in such a reverberating and majestic space.

Our final day of a full week in London, we had tickets for a day-trip outside of the city. Ominous skies and forecast greeted us as we boarded a bus to Bath. After a 2 1/2 hour ride, sure enough the rain broke about 10 minutes after we arrived. We used our remaining umbrellas and bought a cheap replacement and managed to enjoy our afternoon in the charming city regardless. We went on a walking tour to see the elegantly designed village up close. The city was built uniformly with limestone quarried from nearby in the Palladian/Georgian style of architecture. The backdrop of so many historical dramas and Jane Austen books, it was a delight to visit the "Crescent" and "Kings Circus." The town is essentially built of interconnected town homes, terraced in a clever way to create the illusion of one large grand palace. This enabled wealthy Georgian society to spend "the season" in town in a suite of rooms that still appeared to equal the grandeur of their home estates. And though it rained throughout our afternoon there, I would gladly spend another drizzly day in Bath.

After Bath, we got on the bus and back-tracked to Stonehenge. In the center of the unprotected Salisbury plain, the gentle rainstorm of Bath was a windy tempest out here. As a result, we bundled tighter in our jackets and circled the ruin more quickly than we might have on a clear day. It's worth the weather -- one of the coolest things we've seen all summer. The path around the henge actually takes you in much closer to the stones than I thought it would, and it's amazing to see how truly massive the sarsens are up close. Older by far than anything we've seen in Europe...older than the Colosseum, the Parthenon, or even the ancient Mycenaean ruins, it's hard to imagine how the early people were able to build this still mysterious monument with monoliths weighing up to 45 tons dragged 20 miles overland. So much is still unknown about its purpose, and new discoveries are being uncovered here still. There's a reason this place shows up on so many traveling bucket lists. After we'd gotten enough pictures despite the weather, we bundled back into the bus and headed home for hot soup and hot chocolate. An accurate experience of UK weather for sure, it made it hard to believe it's still sweltering August summer back home.