Travelogue Part 3: The Day You Have Depends Entirely On Your Choice of Shoes

I don't feel like these entries are very lyrical, but I'll just keep going.

The third day in London, we should be paid for the private tours we created. We shredded a few leg muscles and pretty much have crippled B for life. But we're only here a few minutes, we got stuff to see!

This was the first morning we were brave enough to say NO to the shitty overpriced hotel breakfast and B walked up a block to the cafe on the corner we discovered had everything fresh and perfect and fed us all in bed for the price of ONE hotel breakfast. Did I mention in bed. Yes, B just dumped it all on the bed, and we enjoyed fresh baguette crumbs and all, breakfast sandwiches, fruit, tea from the in-room pot, everything.

This was the day we now had a few under our belt so we could attack it in our newly learned way and come back sore and triumphant.

Perhaps I should let the pictures tell this story.

What made Westminster Abbey so good was the dead people inlaid in the floor that you could take your picture with.

Also the ceilings had carving and the light through stained glass makes even a 21 year old son look like  a saint.

Choosing sandals made for city hiking on a sweaty day, good choice number one. I only regret on the whole trip aside from mistakes made in florence and milan, was that I left my plastic berkenstocks at home, the all time best shoe ever.  Pack those, if you're going. They want to go with you.

The only problem with monuments is that there are alot of other people in August who want to see dead people at Westminster Abbey too. So you are never alone, in your travels. You are crammed into a London Look Fest with all the people who had the same lame summer ideas as you, running around the same hot pinball machine track, pinging off monuments and having a nice group sweat.

We lost Bruce at Westminster Abbey which I'm not sure how, there's no cellar or ceiling he could climb into. The girls also wandered off to find backgrounds that looked like Hogwarts to take pictures, and we did a chalk rubbing of some ancient saints which are all safely tubed up and yet still crushed somewhere in my souvenir bag. Always the best things to see are the secret rooms, the ones that are colder than the rest, with the echoes and the forlorn lost look. You can imagine the lifetimes that have come through those rooms, while you're still enjoying your thriving, robust one time through. Those rooms sit with their own stone solace, knowing more than you, suggesting you stop and consider any unease in your soul and stay just long enough to get a glimmer of man, I am frail and fleeting, and then you realize this room offers no ice cream. Churches are hooks for the mortalest of fears

We sweated a walk to Buckingham Palace which said it was close but turns out what's on maps and what our legs think is close are very different. We got to the front gate which for this group is close enough, took a pic, thought about what it would be like to drive home into THAT house after a dodger game, and then hailed a taxi, a big old guy named Harry like the prince, who drove us to the London Eye and must spend his life driving people to and from famous landmarks in a five mile radius. We got to the Eye earlier than our ticket time and they are DICKS about letting you get on early so Nathan and I had time to fill up our water jug in the very warm bathroom which is down a series of warmer and warmer stairs and apparently built on Satan's aloha deck. Once back above ground and in ferris wheel line, I mentioned the I won't be getting everyone's water again conversation but they looked at me so hot and miserable so I stopped halfway and passed out lollypops which only Bruce took. The kids behind us in line were from Texas doing their summer abroad and had done nothing but go to plays. 

It's good to get your whole family in a little glass cage and then spin up really high and see all of London. We thought we had seen alot of London and from up high we realized we had only seen a button on the fancy shoe of London. Also you know how well your family is doing by how they treat each other in the little glass cage where you're all trapped. That day, we were united in Londonwonder. Londer. Happy for B, he had all his kids in a windowbox. Like he wanted.

We walked across the bridge to take an iconic Big Ben phone booth picture. Then a subway hop to the Churchill War Rooms underground. We all liked the war rooms because we seem to like going underground and looking at stuff, but even B who cares about history and the reasons for battles lagged after awhile in the Churchill rabbit hole. I liked seeing the late 30's outfits and the beds they slept on, and the simplicity of a phone with a cord stuck in one place. We got silly listening to those audio tours and contemplated shutting various doors as we walked through to confuse the groups coming behind us like Nathan did at Tower of London where we laughed so much.

We finished the day like we did all days, getting pizza or otherthanpizza on the cute carless street by our hotel, playing frisbee there and going to the basketball court where Nathan got asked to play with a group of guys. He didn't have the right shoes so someone lent him theirs. Lilly shot a few too even though she had crocs on.  

That night was when Bruce had the talk about how Barry and I don't stand up for trans rights and how we couldn't understand any of it because we were too old. He talked to his dad, the one who had been through black rights and women's rights, and was basically for all rights. For some reason Bruce had invented that no one in his family could understand him, or why JK Rowling was a transphobe. The kids kept wandering in and out of the room blinking like wtf is going on until finally we achieved some kind of brucetruce because the longer he talked the more he realized that his fight was all in his own head and he ended up apologizing. Still, always entertaining. Then he stayed up til 3 in the hallway talking to the indonesia that has sucked alot of his Bruceness fun away.

But we didn't know that, cause we were sleeping. Cause we were going to Paris tomorrow.

I am not good with putting pictures in these blogs. I'll have to get better. In my mind I'm good.