Around London, no cycling

April 3, 2014 to April 5, 2014

After a good night's sleep, we descended four flights of stairs to the basement dining room for the first of the many “full English” breakfasts of the trip. These breakfasts always include choice of cereal, two rashers of back bacon, 1 egg, baked beans and brown or white toast (served with the slices separated in a rack so they cool extra quickly) and coffee or tea. Optional additions can include yogurt, cut fruit, sausage, broiled mushrooms and tomatoes—definitely enough to keep one going until lunchtime.

We had a full program of activities planned for our three days in London, but were somewhat limited by the historically high air pollution levels. Tiny dust particles from the Sahara had swirled up to combine with the usual metropolitan vehicle emissions to create an extremely toxic brew that was off the charts in terms of the potential lung damage. We usually like to walk as much as possible in London, but Thursday we took the tube to our destinations. Rain on Thursday night settled the dust and reduced the pollution levels, which was a great relief.

Part of the Chinese pottery exhibit at the British Museum

On Friday we tubed to south Kensington to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum. Then we walked over to the Royal College of Art adjacent to the Albert Hall for the Ceramic Art London exhibit and sale—a major pottery event put on by the Craft Potters Association of Great Britain. After the show we walked all the way back to our hotel, through Kensington Gardens and the Notting Hill area, past Edgeware Road with the halal shops and the ladies wearing burkhas and onward to Bloomsbury—many kilometres.

Saturday morning we took the tube to Kew Gardens for a look at the spring flowers and the famous glasshouses. On our way back in the late afternoon, we waited at the Kew station for a long time as the train into London was delayed because of signalling problems. The train finally arrived, but travelled really slowly and stopped a few times before we reached Earl's Court, where we changed lines. Later we found out that all the rest of the trains from Kew were cancelled that day. Ours was the last one to make it through the signalling problem, so we were lucky!

In the large tropical glass house in Kew Gardens

Looking back through the extensive tree plantation toward a Kew Garden glass house

View across the pond near the entrance to the gardens

Tomorrow, Sunday, the bicycling part of our trip will start. We have train reservations to Plymouth, where we will stay for two nights and then cycle west into Cornwall.

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