Greg and Deb's Travel Blog

We decided to have a quiet day today and to just explore a little of Eastbourne on foot. We waited a little after breakfast for the morning showers to ease before we walked along the foreshore to the pier.

We started the day at around 8:40am for the drive over to Deal. Sandwich was about halfway to Deal, it was early and there didn’t appear to be a lot to see so we cut Sandwich out. ?

Somehow, today turned into a monster, it wasn’t meant to be so!
We started our day with breakfast at 8am and were out the door exploring Canterbury at 8:30.
Our plan was to start at the Westgate Gardens, but somehow we, started by having a look at the Marlowe Theatre. It is a 1200 seat theatre, said to be one of the best regional theatres in the UK. From what we could see of its program, it has a show on at least every other night. And a vast array of very different shows at that. Everything from comedy, to musicals, to orchestra backed artists. Definitely something for everyone.

Today we picked up our hire car to begin our road trip of England. We decided it was easiest to get a cab to the car rental yard rather than pick the car up and load up at the flat, parking is a huge issue here and all over London.
Unlike Chaucer’s version, our travels to Canterbury will not include fidelity, courtship or death! However, I am sure there will be a bit of intrigue and a lot of love, and many colourful tales.
And so, it begins.

Simple plans for the day, have a look around Knightsbridge/Belgravia, French Open Men’s Final and get ready for tomorrow, the start of our road trip of Britain.
Lucky for us, I decided we needed an early start, so I got up at 4:00am. I discovered it’s light here at that time. I don’t know what time sunrise starts here (and I don’t want to experience it), but it was well underway. Somehow I managed to wake Deb, ? , so we both got an early start.

We left home around 9:30am and headed to Pall Mall for the Queen’s Birthday Trooping of the Colour parade.

We arrived a bit before 10am and it was 4 or 5 deep on the Green Park side of the Mall so went over to the St James Park side opposite where its was only 2 deep, Buckingham Palace was on our left. There were so many people there to watch the event, we heard that some had arrived around 4am to get a good spot. There were police everywhere, many with machine guns.

The weather forecast for today was rain, lots of it. So we decided to take a rest day, and besides, Ash Barty (the Australian tennis player) was in the French Open semi-finals.

So it was a very easy, lazy day, doing a bit of this, a bit of that and watching the tennis. Ash won her semi in 3 sets, so she plays again tomorrow in the final (I’m pretty sure Deb has plans to watch that game) early afternoon our time.

Deb is already starting to look at the weather for things ahead. We leave our London flat on Monday, heading east to Canterbury.

So that’s about it for us for the day.

Today was too big for our site to gandle in one posting. The rest of our day follows. ???

Just over the road we came to The London Silver Vaults. The vaults were originally opened in 1876 as an area for safe deposit vaults for London’s wealthy, and was used as the storage area London’s silver dealers during WWII. They are situated relatively deep underground (maybe 3 floors below street level. And as the name suggests, the whole underground floor is filled with vaults of many sizes, everyone with a large old style bank vault type door. Many of the larger vaults are now used as retail outlets, as well as secure storage, for London’s top silver dealers. In the shops we saw everything from a silver (probably just silver plated, but you never know) WWII heavy duty machine gun, so many antique pieces ( we saw items that belonged to Kings and Queens and other famous people, teapots, and all silverwares you could possibly think of. There are over 30 shops to choose from. Very interesting and worth a visit.

It was almost lunch so we walked down to the Bloomsbury Farmers Market just behind The University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. We walked around and soaked up the atmosphere and stalls on offer. We finished up getting a Pasty and Sausage Roll for lunch. A good choice in the end, it started raining again, and our plan to sit on a bench and people watch while we ate lunch turned into sheltering under a small eave and eating lunch standing up.

From there went set off to the British Museum. A daunting building to set foot in, there is so much stuff in there. And it’s all really interesting. We started with The Rosetta Stone, a stone tablet that was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone was a stone tablet that recorded a government decree on 27 March 196BC. The decree was written in three languages, Hieroglyphs – the traditional script of Egyptian monuments,  Demotic – the everyday script of liberated Egyptians and at the bottom Greek – the language used by the government of the day in Egypt (Egypt was ruled by a Greek dynasty at that time). It was this last greek entry that was the key. In another room, we saw a vase called the Rosetta Vase. It too had the same message inscribed on it in several languages. It is fascinating to see how archeology works. We walked further afield and saw so many incredible items on display. It makes you wonder how England obtained all these treasures of the ancient world, and how they were moved from where they were (Egypt, Greece, Italy, ……) to this museum. We saw items from ancient Europe and England, The Roman conquests, the medieval period through to today.

They had a special display on the times of Lieutenant/Captain James Cook. It was impressive the amount of work he did in a relatively short time, he sailed so much of the world.

From there we walked down to Covent Garden markets. We have been there before and we weren’t disappointed. So much life goes on in and around the area. We stopped, watched and listened to a string quartet play in the lower restaurant area. On the way out we stopped to watch a busker, his big trick was a bed of nails!

We then walked to Fortnun & Mason, a fancy homewares and gift shop. And it was all very fancy. They have one of the finest/most extensive tea selections in London. We looked around for a while, but didn’t buy anything.

We then caught our favourite No.6 bus home to relax a bit.

I took a stroll to the shops to get some provisions, on my way I noticed some activity in a small park just behind the chapel near us. It was The Resident’s Society of Mayfair and St James’s Summer Garden Party. It seems that Summer Garden Parties are a thing in London with many communities organising them. At 50 pound a head for non-members we decided to give this one a miss. When you’ve been to one summer party with drinks, canapes, barbeque, entertainment, live music, a casino and “fabulous” raffle prizes you have been to them all!

Looks like a very damp day tomorrow, we might have an easy day watching the French Tennis Open semi-finals. Let’s hope Ash Barty does well.Number of Views :716

We had a bit bigger day today! We left home around 9:30am and caught the No.6 bus expecting to get off at Drury Lane, but no, this No. 6 terminated at Piccadilly Circus! Go figure huh! So we got off this No. 6 bus and got the No.6 bus that was just behind us that was going to Aldwych, where  No.6 buses are meant to go! ?

We had a very slow quiet day, time to catch up.

We took a bus and the tube to the south side of London Tower Bridge.
We had organised a lunch with our neighbour Helen from our apartment building in Adelaide.

By 12:40pm we were up on level 32 of The Shard at the Oblix restaurant.