Don’t ask me, I’m not the Tour Guide!

Thursday 5^th September.  

You wouldn’t think we’d been planning this trip for 12 months. I should have every day planned with the optimum amount of sightseeing, all organised by locations etc, etc but I don’t. And I certainly don’t know exactly where we are and which way we should turn at the next corner or what Tube line we need or where the station is. So stop asking me,…. Trevor!! Had a bit of a meltdown this morning, again, considering recent events, not doing too badly.

Houses of Parliament

The Tower of London

We easily catch the Tube to Westminster to hop the river cruise, but as the HOHO bus ticket only covers us to Tower Bridge, we need a ticket from TB to Greenwich, and you can’t buy that at Westminster Pier. So we have to do a quick bolt off the ferry at TB, buy a ticket to Greenwich, and luckily make it back on to the same boat. Again, the weather has been amazing, 30 degrees apparently, certainly not what we were expecting. There’s a bar on board and the sun is over the yard arm, so it’s bottoms up! The crew on board take turns to give a commentary as we go and it’s typical Pommie humour.

Tower Bridge

The Thames tide rises 7 metres in 5 hours and the current is really moving, really obvious where the water rushes around bridge pylons.

Off the boat at Greenwich and it’s definitely lunch time. We find our way past the Cutty Sark and in to town. There’s a sign for the Greenwich markets, and where there’s markets, there’s street food, our favourite. We buy 5 Ethiopean vegetarian sambosas (yes, sambosas) for 2 pound and they’re yummy, but not really enough. Looking for a loo, we find the Horse and Coach pub and get a couple of drinks and a Caesar salad before we tackle the hill up to the Observatory. What a view!! And while we were eating lunch, a cruise ship had snuck in and docked. Out the back of the National Maritime Museum is the biggest ship in a bottle we’ve ever seen, on a plinth that is supposed to house a statue of James Cook. Don’t know what became of Jim, well, his statue anyway. The ship in the bottle is far more interesting I think.

Trust me, it really was huge!

Got a text from Hayden at lunchtime, telling me that we had a message on our answering machine that he had recorded and put on facebook so I could hear it. It was from Tony Abbott, a ‘personal’ call drumming up support for the election. Sorry mate, you’re too late, we voted already. It’s bad enough being bombarded with junk mail, but now they’re starting with phone calls? I think that’s just too invasive.

We find our way to the Docklands Light Rail station to negotiate the trip back to Russell Square to do some grocery shopping at the Brunswick Centre on the way home. There’s a Waitrose supermarket, a chain we’ve never heard of with mostly all their own brands and a wide range of products. It’s a taste of what our supermarkets will be like when Coles and Woolies finally crush all other suppliers and brand names and only sell generic products. Armed with dinners for 2 nights and supplies for breakfasts we cleverly find our way home on foot.