Pray God We May Make Haste, and Come Too Late

I blame Shakespeare for the title. We finished off Saturday with Richard II at the Globe Theater.

But we started the day with Westminster Abbey. We went through the entire thing and wrote down every name we recognized - page upon page. We saw Milton, Shelley, Keats, Shakespeare, Churchill, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Oliver Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots; Henries the III, IV, V, VI, VII, LCXYZIIVZX (just kidding); William Wilberforce, William Pitt the Younger, Isaac Newton, etc.

There were a whole lot of people there. Most of them we didn't even know; had never heard about. A lot were in Latin, which didn't help us a bit, but I am so glad we went.

After Westminster Abbey, we went to the Churchill War Rooms, the extensive basement where Churchill directed the war. I had thought that the war was directed from a bunker system, but it was actually just a semi-reinforced basement. It is surprising that the Germans never bombed the place. But they didn't, and the war went on, and finally the war ended.

In keeping with the war idea, we went to the RAF museum next.

This was not the highlight of our trip, as I snapped under the pressure of trying to see everything we wanted to see in London and spending a great deal of time (I thought) in an exhibit geared mostly for kids and not seeing the RAF planes and history I wanted to. We had made it all the way back to the road when we decided that we really wanted to finish out the museum, regardless of time constraints.

It was a good thing we did; they had an entire hangar filled with planes and objects from World War II. We were able to go inside the flying boat (which is, essentially, the bottom of a boat with the top of a plane). There were medals and uniforms - including a manequin of Goering wearing his uniform. We even saw the remains of a crashed Hawker Hurricane (a British plane only in service for 12 days during the Battle of Britain). It was a fascinating place.

By this time, we were hungry and tired, so we went back to our hotel via Tube (the strike was only for Thursday). We minded the gap between the train and the platform, changed at Embankment for the Victoria lines, and arrived at our hotel again, footsore and looking forward to taking off our heavy backpacks. We walked around the block to the Queen's Arms, a small pub nearby.

In the interest of having the whole British pub experience, we had no alcohol. But we had bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes), fish, a cheese platter, and something called "Sticky Toffee Pudding with Honeycomb Ice Cream." You can imagine the deliciousness of that last one.




We'd already seen Richard II at home on DVD to prepare for coming here, so we didn't feel rushed to get to the Globe and spend 3 hours standing on blistered feet. We managed to get there right when Bolingbroke overthrows Richard - about 10 minutes before the intermission. We were groundlings - people who stand in the yard, the space around the base of the stage. The people who stood in front of us left at the intermission and never came back, so we got front-row "seats." In fact, I put my arms on the stage and rested my chin there.

 After Richard was killed and Bolingbroke did his spiel about how much he loved him though he wished him dead, the play ended with a curtain call. We left before the mad rush of the thundering hordes out the doors of the theater. We took a picture of St. Paul's and Tower Bridge all lit up at night, stopped off at Westminster Station to run up the stairs and take a picture of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, and went back to our hotel.