London: Tube Travel Adventures, Must-See Attractions, and The Play’s the Thing

Departure Day finally arrived, and it all started in the hot tub, where I met a tall, handsome man who knew a lot about airplanes.

We talked about destinations (London, Amsterdam), and reasons for our trips (fun, work). I tapped his travel knowledge, as I am wont to do when chatting with globe-trotting people, which he most definitely was. Lots of useful advice, especially this: Watch out for well-dressed thieves when you put down your bag. They might place a different bag right next to yours, then casually stroll off with the goods.

Excellent advice I’d heard before, but now it was fresh in my mind and led to a spot of trouble later.

As he toweled off the handsome stranger casually remarked, “Well, if you decide to go to Amsterdam instead of London, my flight is at 1:30 pm – and I’m flying the plane.”  Ohhhhh – that’s why he knew so much about plane safety. He approved of British Airways, thank goodness, and we made it to London in one piece. 

Since then, we’ve having the best time! We refreshed our rusty travel skills; waved to the Queen at Buckingham Palace; cheered on demonstrators outside 10 Downing Street (a protest about something other than Brexit); and hung out (literally) with Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth the First, Van Gogh, and Kurt Cobain. We’ve also learned to cram ourselves onto the Tube with the best of ‘em, although Padre did get smushed in a ‘doors closing’ incident. And next time a proselytizer rings our doorbell, we may just smile and say hello, especially if they’re holding the Book of Arnold. 

London Tube Adventures and our First Winding Staircase 

We’re packed very light this trip – a small suitcase and a backpack each – so we hustled through Heathrow, purchased a phone card plus our London Underground Oyster cards, then hopped on the Piccadilly Line to Russell Square, no sweat. So much simpler to skip up and down staircases and escalators with light luggage.

But still. After we exited the train, there it was: the LIFT. Funny how a 33-year old memory came flooding back in an instant. I’d been to London long ago with a good girlfriend, and she had endured a horrid ‘Me-too’ moment in the crush of humanity riding up from the depths of a Tube station on a lift just like this one. As we surged with the masses toward the doors of the lift, I did NOT want to get on that thing, and I spotted stairs to our right. We’re travelling light, Padre, I said – we can do a couple flights of stairs, can’t we?

At first, this was fine. But it wasn’t just a couple stairs, and our ‘light’ luggage suddenly turned very heavy – funny how that works. The flights of stairs wound round and round, up up and still up, all steeply up. I started out with gusto, but by the top was heaving that heavy brick of a suitcase, step-by-daunting step.

And here’s where the handsome pilot’s advice hurt us a bit: Nice young people offered to help us with the cases, but did we take them up on it? No, of course not – they might, after all, be well-dressed strangers making to haul off with the goods. Probably just polite kind persons, but hey, we survived, and our workout for the day was complete. Later, we’d face another remarkable winding staircase; London’s historical buildings seem to be chock full of these twisting spirals.

While it was dead of night back home, London was just waking up. So we dropped bags off at our Bloomsbury lodging and headed back to Trafalgar Square to pick up our London Pass credentials. I love city travel passes, which provide unlimited attractions admissions for a set number of days, but they’re not for everyone – they take extensive preplanning to make them worthwhile. Preplanning’s my thing, though, so in a future post I’ll explain how we get the most out of a city pass for those who want to give it a try.

Famous Faces: London’s National Portrait Gallery 

I asked the London Pass guide where the nearest restroom was, but based on her look of confusion I realized I needed to say ‘toilet’ (I don’t think anyone in London asks for the ‘restroom’…..’). She directed us across the street to the National Portrait Gallery.

Once there, we had to check out Elizabeth the First’s photoshopped* nose (*or whatever they called altered images back then). 

Did you know she had a really really big nose? We did not know this, and we learned how big it was when we walked past her tomb a couple days later. Lizzie’s body lay underneath a tomb topped by a full-body cast image, including death mask. The mask was cast in the moments right after her death, when she couldn’t very well order anyone to make her nose look smaller. Let’s just say that the images in all the history textbooks, and those we saw in the Portrait Gallery, do NOT show this nose. Very modern of her, I’d say, to care so much about her image. And she pulled it off, as long as people don’t see the death mask, which most people don’t. She would have rocked Instagram, I’ll bet.

Elizabeth the First happens to be one of my favorite historical players, and I loved her real nose. Her National Gallery portraits are regal concoctions of her holding the globe in one hand, her scepter in another, fraught with symbolism, power, significance. But she was human, and didn’t like her nose. I get that.

We also paused by Shakespeare’s famous portrait, a copy of which hung in my Language Arts classroom for years and years. Very cool to stand inches from the real deal. If I could throw a dinner party and invite one historical figure, he would be the one (well, maybe Lizzie too. and Jesus). I mean, how did he come to know so much about people? Power? Love? Death? Grief? The artist captures Shakespeare’s piercingly intelligent eyes, observing me, as I observed him. Of course. 

St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Other Winding Staircase

We only had a brief hour or two left before the inevitable jet lag crash, and where better to collapse than in a grand cathedral? We practiced our Map-and-Tube skills by wandering in fits and starts to St. Paul’s. And by the way, Google Maps only helps so much – make sure to carry paper backups, especially a Tube map. Yes, maps are posted all over the Underground walls, but when we needed to check the full map, what’s on the walls isn’t enough – the little cheat sheet maps come in handy. 

As we neared the Cathedral in London’s central financial district, the subway crush reached a frenzy; commuters hung on the straps and squeezed through closing doors at the very last second. I propelled myself onto a car, only to hear Padre behind me cursing (which he seldom does, at least not in public). The closing doors shut on his backpack and yanked him back. He freed it, thank heavens, but other smushed-close passengers looked at the swearing man askance. I said to no one in particular, ‘And he’s a chaplain – think of that!’ which produced a bemused smile or two among the spectators.

St. Paul’s Cathedral sat square in the middle of some of the worst WWII Blitz bombing attacks, but survived miraculously unscathed, which served as a source of inspiration for war-weary Londoners. Inside, hymns from an ongoing choir/organ rehearsal floated throughout the limestone and alabaster-decorated interior, up to the soaring Christopher Wren rooftops. Turns out Wren thought St. Paul’s to be one of his failures, even though today most agree that it is his masterpiece. We concur with the ‘masterpiece’ folks, especially after enjoying a privileged glimpse of our second spiral staircase of the day.

If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll know these stairs. They appear in the Potter films as the Divination Stairwell, which provides access to the Divination Classroom. We’re more Christopher Wren fans than Potter fans, but certainly see why the filmmakers chose these steps: They seemed to magically hover in the air, floating in space as they spiraled down in a honeycomb pattern to the dark depths. You’ll need to take a tour to see the stairs, but the tours are included in the admission price. 

Another special privilege for tour-goers: Sandra, our delightful red-sashed tour guide, sat us down in the Cathedral’s choir stalls, somewhere I’ve longed to sit in other grand cathedrals but the seats are always roped off – no commoners allowed. 

Not this time. I imagined Charles and Diana regally parading right by me to the wedding alter in 1981 – until I nodded off, sitting up. I never nod off during the day, and certainly not sitting up, so the jet lag had arrived. We hung in there through a fascinating tour of the crypt, Padre’s favorite part because of all the dead people, including Christopher Wren himself, Lord Nelson of the famous Trafalgar Square Nelson’s Column, and the First Duke of Wellington. 

We returned to the Westminster area early the next morning to try for the second time to visit the Churchill War Rooms Museum, having given up the first day due to long lines. If you’re going to see just ONE thing in London, we’d say see this. These rooms, closed up relatively intact at the end of WWII, are a fascinating time capsule of the War years, and of the man, Winston Churchill. 

I scurried ahead of the few other early entrants to explore the warren of underground rooms, including the War Cabinet room, the Map room, Mrs. Churchill’s room, the kitchen, the Churchill speech taping room, the living quarters for all the staff. One gal next to me told her companion, “Their rooms are bigger than our hotel room!” and they were, but only barely. London hotel rooms are famously small, ours included, but just like the underground war rooms, they have everything we needed (wide persons probably won’t fit through the door of our shower, though, it’s that small).  And thank goodness we don’t need a bedpan, which Churchill’s staff obviously needed, since they were under every bed. 

Churchill considered words to be his most powerful tools in the war against tyranny, and what a wordsmith he was! (Churchill, the biography, is a fascinating read, fyi): 

He’s the guy who wrote:

“It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

And this one, for those hopeless and defeated times:

“This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

And then my new fave, since too many nice folks have offered us their seats this trip. We must be getting old even though we don’t feel like it:

“Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!”

Yeah, we get it. But we’ve still got it, at least for now, if the Fitbit has anything to say about it (10 miles and counting, by early afternoon).

So on we went, next door to 10 Downing Street, where we said ‘hello’ to Boris Johnson, current Prime Minister. He’s still in charge, at least for now, but several Londoners have made it clear to us they want him gone. He’s not popular in London, no not at all, due to the Brexit debacle. 

But we saw a clutch of ladies (mostly) in crisp blue suits hoisting protest signs high over another issue entirely. They were Thomas Cook travel agents, turns out, participating in a demonstration over the firm’s sudden bankruptcy. It left travellers stranded and workers threatened with the loss of jobs, pensions – all that survival stuff for basic existence. We gave them a hearty ‘huzzah’ as we walked past – hang in there, ladies! Always seems to be the little guys that lose, when the big guys fail, doesn’t it?

After a ‘meh’ Hop-on Hop-off bus tour where we mostly sat in traffic, we raced by Buckingham Palace and quickly waved ‘hi’ to the Queen, as we barely make it to our seats for The Book of Mormon. Or thought we barely made it, since matinees in London start at 2:30 pm, not 2:00 pm as they do in the States. Whew!

And what a show. And it’s not really about one church so much – it’s a coming-of-age tale. The charming naiveté of Elders Arnold and Kevin reminded me so much of all the students I met as a high school teacher. When you’re 19, don’t you have to have your illusions shattered, your innocence lost? Can we really grow up, if that never happens? The play also tackles serious culture clash themes, themes of poverty, ignorance, disease, human rights. Even Brexit! You should have heard the audience gasp the final time Arnold mispronounced another character’s name, a running joke in the play. He clearly said ‘Ohdonobrexit’. The mostly-British audience got the reference, and so did we.

So the play tackled all that, and the best part?  It was absolutely hilarious. One of the best plays I’ve seen in ages. 

On our wander home we had time to pop into the National Gallery for more Famous Art viewing, and we agreed that London is just one ‘wow!’ moment after another so far. A proper exploration of all its treasures might take at least a month, and we only have four more days. But we’re going to give it our best shot, just like Hamilton*! (*our other London play, which I’ve been wanting to see forever  – so stay tuned).

So on we go – Thanks, everyone, as always for following along!