Thursday, May 26 Bolton-London
We spent a lot of the next few days on 'the tube' or 'the underground'..the subway in London. Our home station was "Golders Green".
What started as a full day of travel (Olly’s house in Bolton) to London, ended
with a rocket-fire evening walking tour of the ‘great monuments of London’.
We took the train to London’s Euston Station , then took the tube to Golders Green–the neighborhood of London we’d be staying in for the next few days. The weather had been mostly kind to us throughout the trip, but it was really pouring down strong as we lugged the luggage up Golders Green Road towards the King Solomon Hotel. At this point…we were just a bit tired. We’d really filled our days and had been moving at a fast pace since the moment we’d started this trip. After getting drenched, we took…it was maybe a whopping 45 minutes or so downtime in our rooms before meeting up again. Then we decided to have dinner locally–just down the street. There were a number of restaurants, most of them marked ‘kosher’(except for the KFC!). Golders Green is a strongly Jewish area. Our hotel rooms all had the little wooden mezuzah attached to the doorframe—I’d never seen these before, and most of the guests were speaking foreign languages or had strong foreign accents. ( I didn’t recognize the speach…could have been Hebrew? or some Eastern European languages? Some of the folks we met who worked there were Serbian..some Polish.)
We ended up eating at an Asian Vegetarian Buffet down the road. Pretty good stuff, and Leland being a vegetarian was happy to discover this place. ( He seemed to have a pretty easy time finding appropriate meals all through our trip…until we hit the Phoenix airport on the way home (and the flight there wasn’t much better….’um, we had one of those vegetarian things…but now we don’t’.)
Our London neighborhood. Looking up towards our hotel. I liked the curve of the road and the sillhouette of the buildings.
Looking down that same street towards the tube station.
Here's our hotel. Not very luxurious, but affordable for a troupe of musicians, served a big breakfast, and had easy access to the Underground. Leland was the mastermind of practical road management--a great quality to have along.
After relaxing and catching our breath, we hopped on the tube thinking we’d go see Leicester Square and nearby Picadilly Circus; get a taste of London while we still had some of the evening left.
We took the tube to Charing Cross, walked over to Leciester Square (which as all boarded up in the middle and under construction), then over to Picadilly Circus and basically began a night of whirlwind power-walking all over central London. We walked down the Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace (which looked nice lit up in it’s night lights), then over and around to the area near the river that has Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.
The Houses of Parliament had a sort of protest/camp-in thing going on(close guantonimo/stop the war)–seemingly to coincide with Obama’s visit which was happening pretty close to the time of our visit.
Buckingham Palace. Flags up, Queen must've been in--resting up for our gig tomorrow at the Bull & Gate most likely.
Westminster Abbey
Houses of Parliament
It was a great high to be walking around on a beautiful night in London. Rain had been predicted off and on throughout the days we were staying in this town, but only on that initial walk to the hotel did it actually come down. The lights were gorgeous, and with most of our shows behind us, I think we’d felt that we were already quite happy with how things were turning out. One more show to go, and tomorrow set aside to be ‘tourists’. Life was good.
We were looking at Westminster Abbey…and I was convinced that this couldn’t be the ‘front’…cuz it looked like a side view…no matter how gorgeous it was….so the rest of the gang agreed to try and ‘walk around the block’ to the front. Well, it wasn’t as easy as all that. The ‘block’ wasn’t exactly square…and it was a bit of a maze, and a few of the little roads seemed quite small and deserted and reminded me of one of those ‘Jack the Ripper’ or Hammer Studios horror movies set in foggy Victorian London. Well, we soon made it back to a more well-lit and noisy area..and saw what may or may not have been the ‘front’–it was definitely marked as the ‘entrance’ if you were attending services—the ‘tours’ went to the ‘side’ –the one you see in our posted picture here. Later, if I can figure out how, I’ll post a short video that John took….hope it works here on the blog–it’s just of us standing and enjoying the scene on the bridge over the Thames and waiting for Big Ben to toll 11 o’clock. You can also see the Millineum Eye (the gargantuan Ferris Wheel) on the other side of the bridge. For now, here’s a photo of the big clock itself.
