Day Three In London

We started our day with the hotel's typical English breakfast.  It is a great breakfast.  It also answers a lot of questions like how their health care system, the NHS, works so well.  The health system works because after a mere 40 years of eating eggs, ham, sausage links, baked beans, grilled mushrooms, cheeses and cakes, they all just have a quick coronary and die.

We should have London figured out by Sunday on our way to the airport.  We used the last half a day of our hop-on-hop-off bus pass to get to the Tower of London.  Hop-on-hop-off is misnamed since it should be named something like try-2-find-a-stop-and-wait as we spent our time trying to figure out their map to find the nearest hop back on location.  What would normally be just a simple inconvenience was exacerbated by the Special Olympics which regularly rerouted busses at a whim.

The Tower of London

The Tower of London was the scene of English beheadings and torture.  I gather from their records only 8 people were ever beheaded there and fewer than 100 folks were tortured.  This seems insignificant, unless of course you happened to be one of the famous unfortunates.  Various sections dated back to the 13th century.  Nothing that old would ever survive in Miami as it would have been rezoned, demolished and a new shopping center would be built on the site, just across the street from the other mall.

After our visit to the Tower we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch.  The weather was beautiful and there were people eating outside.  Unlike the English locals we had seen the sun before and elected to eat inside.  They left the front doors open so it was almost like eating outside.  I had a large smoked salmon salad and a beer.  Sue also had a salad and a glass of wine.  When it came time to settle our bill the waiter came over just as a large fly flew into the dressing left in the bottom of the bowl.  This was no regular house fly but large British Airways 747 size fly.  Since I was through with the salad this wouldn't have been interesting except, while the waiter watched in amazement, the fly rolled over, kicked a few times and died.  Now I was a bit concerned since I had just eaten a much larger portion than the fly.  I tossed an easy one liner to the waiter by asking, "what's this fly doing in my salad?"  Since I guess he had never seen Groucho Marx knock that one out of the park he just stared back.

After leaving the restaurant I spotted a very old looking church.  It didn't look famous and it wasn't on our list but after watching that fly die in my dressing I thought a little time in a church couldn't hurt.  We were greeted by a nice London tour guide.  We found out later from his associate that being a London tour guide requires a two year course of study and a strict exam.  It covers all aspects of London history and the guide knew quite a bit about the church even though he said he had only been covering the location for a few weeks.  He took us down into the crypt which had stones laid by the Romans in about 860 AD.  After hearing we were Americans he showed us two of the church records.  In two separate books were the recorded marriage of John Quincy Adams and the baptism of William Penn.  Both had taken place in that church.

All Hallows Church near The Tower of London

The church was an amalgam as it had the lower portions which were very old and the outer walls and steeple were ancient but the center of the church dated to the 1950's.  It seems a German bomb found it's way to the center of the church which was destroyed.  They had rebuilt the center in a more modern style and kept the outer walls.

Baptismal Font in Hallows Church

I considered taking The Tube back to our hotel but Sue ruled in favor of another boat ride on the Thames.  We walked back to the hotel and got ready for dinner.  We walked the 0.4 miles to the White Swan Pub.  Just before arriving two English women stopped us and asked for directions.  To my surprise they asked me for the location of the only place I was quite sure of.  I was sure since I had just passed it.  I was sorely tempted to give them the old English "mess withy their heads" routine but I was so tickled to know where The Tate museum was located I didn't even give them deceptive hand gestures.

Tomorrow we will be taking it easy.  We don't plan forced marches of more than 12 miles.  Of the 60 things on our well thought out to-do list we only have 56 to choose from.