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London in the Spring
We were on our way to Egypt in the spring of 2009 and stopped by London on the way. We arrived at the Gatwick airport early in the morning, and our flight to Egypt departed Heathrow in the evening. Our first picture shows an excited Tabitha at the CLT airport. The next picture skips ahead a few hours to the train leaving the Gatwick airport. We stopped at the pastry stand and got a pork and apple pasty.
We were there at just the right time for daffodils, as you can see them along the train tracks.
We used public transportation to get to Kinsington Gardens, and were lucky to have such amazing weather to enjoy the place. The fields of daffodils in the official garden were much easier to photograph than the ones on the side of the tracks.
One disadvantage to our great plan was that we had to carry our luggage all day. The good news was that our luggage consisted of a single backpack and Tabitha's large purse. We've gotten pretty good at traveling light.
The birds were amazing, don't you think?
In picture 3 below you can see a bird sort of sitting on Tabitha's head. Don't worry, she didn't have any droppings to worry about.
There were several great statues in the park, with the horseman above and Peter Pan below. The plants included many of our favorite announcers of spring.
Check out the last picture on the row below. The male mandarin has stunning plumage. We didn't know he was called that until we saw the sign in the pictures below.
Hyacinths have the best fragrance, especially in the batch of spring bulbs that we know about. We both just stopped and sniffed them for a while. Does that look like world travel luggage for 2? Not every girl can travel as light as a Tabitha.
We really like the pink flowering trees. Look for a Japanese Magnolia in our yard that was inspired by this one. That is, if it is still alive by the time you get around to visiting us.
Don't tell the voles about this place! At least not unless you tell Marbles about it too.
Our guidebook had some great suggestions for lunch, but since it was Sunday many of them were closed. We stopped by this small market for some hot apple cider.
With some sugar to improve our critical thinking, we set out for a lunch alternative. We found a little kebab place that looked good, and it was.
We had also read about the model boats in the pond, and since I at one time started building another model boat (though it is currently classified as on hold indefinitely), we wanted to be sure to see them. I'm not sure which racing class the big ones belong to, but they were much bigger than the US1M that I am/was building.
After a few minutes of boat watching, we made our way to the museum by way of Prince Albert.
He sure is shiny! I think they're going to need a bigger can.
Our plan for the day was to stop by the garden and the Natural History Museum, with adjustments to our time spent at each according to the weather. Since the weather had been so spectacular, we knew that our time in the museum was going to be limited. I would recommend this plan to anyone who has all day to get from Gatwick to Heathrow, since it is a very flexible plan with enough activities to occupy an entire day either indoors or outside.
Having been to some of the best Natural History Museums in the world, it becomes less often that I see something totally interesting and new. London has a winner though, since I had never seen "ruin marble," which you can see in the second picture below. It's very fascinating stuff, and if you can pardon the too-slow shutter speed and blurry image, you can read about it in the larger version of the picture.
Click here to continue on our travels to Cairo.
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| This page last modified 09/08/09 | |||||