After the recent series of posts chronicling my family's travels on the continent, we've somehow found ourselves jumping back down the rabbit-hole into the UK once again. Well, let's get to it. We left Brussels early on Sunday morning last week and reached London via the EuroStar train by 10am. Then, after a bit of traipsing about playing tourist and trying to get a photo at the Harry Potter trolley at King's Cross Station (which I'd somehow not seen yet), we arrived at the apartment we would be renting for the week, near Victoria Station, by noon. Staying in apartments rather than hotels is my preferred way to travel, and I gladly tossed my bag down on the bed before we headed out, first to walk through London and then meet my sister Leigh's friend Susan for afternoon tea.
So, from Victoria past Buckingham Palace to St. James's Park: classic London. We ran across an unexpected event on the way, a Prudential bike ride through London to benefit various charities. Watching the bikers make the final turn near Whitehall and cycle for the finish line at Buckingham Palace was thrilling, especially with so many spectators cheering, although it did mean we had to find a way to cross the streets since they were all cordoned off for the ride. That obstacle surpassed, we walked past Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden, where we shopped around, Leigh got some macarons from her most-beloved Ladurée, and we all got some Ben's cookies (yum; a true London and Oxford tradition) before catching a bus to the east end to meet Leigh's friend. The place we'd been planning on going for tea, Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium, is a new cafe near the trendy Brick Lane area that serves tea with, you guessed it, cats for company. We'd been wanting to go the entire trip, but alas, cats are wildly popular and the place was booked full when we got there. (Entrepreneurial note to self: open a business in the future that somehow combines tea, baked goods, and cats.) We still did some shopping at the Brick Lane Sunday markets and ate some delicious Indian food to top off our evening.
It's always fun to play tourist in London, and Monday was Tower of London day. We got up early again to make it to the Tower by the time it opened, only to find we'd arrived early. All the better, and we were among the first people in and went straight to see the Crown Jewels before the queue got too long. (By the afternoon the line was far out the door and they were announcing a 30-minute wait just to get in to see the main displays.) And: wow. Are they the real thing? Hard to believe, but yes, and they are dazzling. Crowns and scepters and coronation regalia and all types of ceremonial finery: go see them sometime for yourself. After the Crown Jewels, since the place was beginning to fill up, we took a tour with one of the Beefeaters and then spent the rest of the day exploring the tower and its sprawling, fascinating, dark history.
I was absorbed, as I always am (and was also happy to make progress in my understanding of the 1000-year history of the British monarchy), but by 3:30pm Leigh and my mom were tired and we left the Tower to walk over to St. Paul's Cathedral. One last Tower observation; we had to take notice (and photos) of the exhibit of over 888,000 red ceramic poppies the Tower of London has installed in its moat for the centennial of the First World War. These poppies stream over the walls of the Tower like (quite honestly) a vast pool of blood, one for each British or Commonwealth serviceman killed in WWI. It's quite a moving sight, and joins the many other references or memorials to the Great War that we saw along the way during our travels. Hard to believe that such bloodshed broke out a hundred years ago, in August 1914.
Anyway, to St. Paul's. Visiting hours at the cathedral were over by the time we got there from the Tower, which turned out to be just as well; we stayed for Evensong instead. For those who haven't experienced it, Evensong is a traditional evening choral service that takes place in many Anglican churches. In St. Paul's, it was just lovely and a welcome time of reflection and respite after a busy day contemplating bloody executions from hundreds of years ago. Afterwards, we met up with Leigh's friend Susan again, took a few minutes to enjoy the view from the Millennium Bridge, and headed to a cozy old pub for dinner (and a return to British cider).
We had deemed Tuesday our bus tour day, and early that morning we all got on a tour bus from Victoria to head out to Leeds Castle and the city of Canterbury, in the southeast England county of Kent, for the day. None of us typically like the rushed, touristy, mass-group-travel nature of bus tours, but we had a special reason for wanting to go out to Leeds Castle: when Leigh was in ninth grade she built a to-scale model of this castle with my dad for a class project, and had wanted to see it ever since. It was lovely in person, especially on a clear but blustery day (I'd been before, my last time abroad, in chilly and cloudy November, and this rendition was much better). The castle has a history of being built and used by English kings, including Henry VIII, before it was sold and restored in the early twentieth century to a wealthy American heiress for use as a private residence. What a place to have as your home, especially when entertaining 1920s and 1930s movie stars to boot.
Oh, and Leeds has rare black swans (brought over from Australia for an exotic bird aviary), which were cool:
After Leeds, the bus took a quick stop by Dover (to see the white cliffs). Yes, I privately thought of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"...
The bus rolled on, and we had a few hours in Canterbury, making our own small pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. This used to be one of the premier religious spots in the world, and people would travel from all over to visit it and pray at the shrine to the English Saint Thomas Becket (who was murdered in the cathedral during a rift with the king, then later canonized) at least once in their lifetimes. The cathedral, perhaps more so than many other cathedrals, brings to life a very different era, especially with the way it towers above Canterbury as though realizing its own importance.
We might have stayed longer and taken more photos, but we were all hungry and grabbed some lunch and had time to walk around the city and its riverside canals. Again, much nicer weather than when I last visited in November a few years ago!
Later that night: back to London, and then up the following morning for our last full day of vacation together. After much debate, we'd opted to make it out to Kew Gardens, in west London. Leigh met a friend in central London for breakfast and the rest of us did some shopping, and then we grabbed some picnic trappings and walked down to the river to get on the Underground and make the trip out to Kew.
I'd heard about the sprawling gardens, which are home to more species and varieties of plants than any other place in the world, from several friends and had been wanting to visit for a while, but nothing prepared me for the wonder I felt throughout the afternoon. Plants from all across the globe greeted us (including some I'd long taken for granted but had never actually seen: coffee, ebony, mahogany, banana, pepper), and I felt like I maybe ought to have been a botanist. In a future life, maybe. After a long few weeks of traveling, wandering the gardens and enjoying nature (though not quiet; Heathrow is right next door, and planes were jetting overhead every 30 seconds) was a great way to end the trip, even though we didn't manage to make it to the main botanical conservatory by the end of the day and see the carnivorous plants there. Rats! The evening's last pleasure: returning to central London and having another meal of fish and chips together before the fam jetted out in the morning.
But wait -- one last thing, from my end! My parents and Leigh left early in the morning on Thursday, and I cleaned and packed up the apartment on my own, then met a friend for a nice lunch. I'd opted not to head straight back to Oxford after that, though, since I'd gotten wind that the Longines Global Champions Tour would be in London starting that day. This is the premier summer series for world-class show jumping horses and riders, including many Olympians and many horse-rider pairs that will be heading to the World Equestrian Games at the end of this month, and I was thrilled to get to watch it in person. For those who are in the horse world: riders like McLain Ward, Ludger Beerbaum, Eric Lamaze, Ben Maher, Beezie Madden, Reed Kessler, and so forth were riding in a just-erected arena at the Horse Guards at Whitehall, right by St. James's Park, which had been taken over by horses for the weekend. I'd never gotten to see this caliber of riders in person before, and I do not exaggerate when I say I was starstruck. Even though the weather was awful, cold and rainy, I got a warm glow from sitting huddled in the stands and watching that day's Grand Prix. Some of those riders turn jumping a horse into a work of art. Another bonus: Antares F, McLain Ward's gorgeous Olympic horse from 2012 (who is now with a different rider from Switzerland) won the Grand Prix, slicing off the turns in the jump-off and snapping up those knees. I got back on the bus to Oxford missing riding, for sure, but the high of getting to watch the GCT stayed with me for days after.
And that's it! I've been back in Oxford for a week now, and in that time I've run errands and taken care of miscellaneous tasks I'd been putting off for weeks, written and read a bit, and packed up my entire room and moved into the new house I'll be sharing with friends this year. Agh, I don't know how I've accumulated so much stuff in the short year I've been here, but my share of the move is finally over, though I've been gradually unpacking and running yet more errands for bedroom and kitchen necessities. Oxford is quiet and sleepy after the whirlwind of travels, and a few of my friends are around, but I'm looking forward to the coming weeks when more people start to trickle back in. But not to get ahead of myself -- it's been a great summer, and this recent stint of family travels was a massive highlight. Until Christmas, then, la familia Kolb!
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