To the Tower!

Friday, April 7, 2006: As you know, I struggle a bit with stairs but escalators and ramps are very rare. My face is still rather tender (I may have cracked my cheek bone) but it did not discolor much so it's not obvious. I just have to prop myself up a little to sleep on that side.

We are having a busy time and I've already filled up one of my camera's Gigabyte memory cards. We've hit a snag however on a trip to Fleetwood. The train from St. Alban's is much more expensive than I thought and leaves either too early to see what I wanted to see in St. Alban's or too late to get us to Manchester until way late at night. We also would need to rent luggage storage in Paddington Station as we have too much luggage (with our local purchases) to wrestle it all around alone on a train. In addition, after riding around the Kent countryside with Richard and seeing the very narrow streets and road directional symbols that I don't know what they mean, I am too uncomfortable about driving here to get a car. So, I found an alternative to get to York. The tour company we have been using here has a tour to York where they would take us up there and drop us off at the Viking Center (around 10 a.m.) on Monday and leave us for several hours to explore the city. I've written my friend in Fleetwood to see if she can meet us there and called the Normandy guest house and cancelled our reservations. I'm feeling much less nervous about the whole trip north now.

You know how I dive right in to any place that I visit (My sister is almost worn out!). So far we have seen:

Buckingham Palace, The Royal Mews, Trafalgar Square, The Victoria Memorial, Madame Tussaud's, Westminster Abbey, The British Museum, Portobello Road Street Fair, Oxford University, Stratford-On-Avon, Warwick Castle, Stonehenge, Roman Bath, Windsor Castle, Leed's Castle, Ingtham Mote, Lullingstone Villa, Big Ben and Parliament, and all the little nooks and crannies around our hotel. Today, we're going to the Tower of London. Whew!

I have the train information to St. Alban's for Saturday where I'll see the Roman Museum at Veralamium, a demonstration of Roman military tactics by Legio XIII, and hopefully have time for some shopping (a concession to Jane). Sunday, I thought we'd dress up a bit and attend services at St. Paul's Cathedral then catch the tube over to Westminster and go up in the London Eye and maybe take a cruise up the Thames. Monday we'll go to York if I can arrange it then Tuesday we'll walk over to the Tate Britian (it's just up the street from our hotel). I thought that would give us a more laid back day before we have to get up early the next morning and catch a shuttle back to Heathrow.