Unlikely Words

A full schedule today: breakfast, the Cabinet War Rooms and the Churchill Museum, lunch, an hour or so relaxing and reading in St. James’s Park, tea at Kensington Palace Gardens, and a final dinner with Gordon and Karen. Here’s how it actually went down:

We took the Tube to Westminster and set about finding some breakfast. We chose the wrong direction (which was becoming a theme of the trip). Whitehall is quite an impressive street, but it’s not exactly teeming with commercial opportunities. Just before we found ourselves back in Trafalgar Square (a landmark we were getting to know all too well), we decided to drop into a pub that had a sign outside advertising breakfast. I was quite proud of us: it was our first “let’s try this!” random meal.

While the guy at the next table nursed his beer, we both had what the menu called a “Breakfast Bloomer,” which was bacon, sausage, and scrambled eggs between two slices of bread. And yes, it was exactly as good as you think it was.

Thus fortified, we trekked back down Whitehall to the Cabinet War Rooms. This was a really great attraction. It had all of the “whoa, it was really just like this!” that was missing for me from the Tower of London. All of the rooms were either exactly how they’d been left or had been carefully reconstructed from photographs. It was decidedly eerie to see the rooms where Britain’s battles of World War II were ordered and coordinated — back when they didn’t yet know they were going to win. (At one point I said to Rachel, “I think I finally understand why people become WWII buffs.”) Especially interesting to me was the central map room, since I’m pretty much a big ol’ geek for maps. In the 1940s they didn’t have any better technology than enormous paper maps, push pins, and thread. The hand-written captions next to each map included things like: “Red wool: German advance, light blue wool: front line (confirmed).” It was really quite something. We bought some postcards.

Right in the middle of the Cabinet War Rooms tour is the Churchill Museum. Churchill is a truly fascinating figure, and this museum presents him in all of his greatness without casting him as a saint. There was so much to see, in fact, that I think we could have spent an entire day there and not taken it all in. In truth, however, we ran out of steam after about an hour. Especially because, perhaps, Churchill’s life before and after the Second World War doesn’t hold as much interest for us as Americans.

When we finally emerged from the museum it was later than we’d planned, and I was hungrier than we’d planned, so we decided to skip the lounging in St. James’s Park and (with a quick detour for pictures in front of Big Ben) head over to the Orangery in Kensington Gardens for tea.

Unfortunately, we arrived about 30 minutes too early for tea, so we sat on a lovely bench nearby and waited. The waiting, combined with a simultaneous low blood sugar incident for the two of us, led to a bit of a grumpiness flare-up. Happily, when the tea finally arrived, some scones and clotted cream cleared everything right up. I even had myself a Pimm’s, which is a nearly compulsory English summer time drink. It was pretty tasty.

After tea we sat back on our bench and read in the sunlight for about an hour, then headed back to Gordon and Karen’s. We had told them that we wanted to make them dinner to thank them for lodging us for four nights, but when we got back they were already in the midst of cooking a delicious batch of chicken tikka curry. Over our strident protestations from the next room, they refused to let us even help!

After dinner we wandered around the town looking for someplace to eat dessert. We ended up in Exmouth Market, at a little restaurant called The Ambassador. We ate dessert, drank port, and then walked home. All in all, a beautiful night and a fitting farewell to London.