We start our 38 hour journey.
It started with a change of flights, air carrier and terminals. We had our first schlep of bags
(360 lbs) down the outside sidewalk.
After boarding the new flight we had to disembark for another plane due to leaking landing gear.
Kristi has become a great journal person. Given an opportunity she will catch up. This is Chicago.
Once we made it to London we had nine hours to kill. We took the express train. It is a fifteen minute ride to the city center but a little pricey.
This is Paddington Station.
Here we caught a taxi. The taxis are newer and a little smaller than when I was a missionary in England in 1966. They are all made by a small company now called London Taxi Limited. They are very efficient with lots of room. With jump seats it will seat five passengers. Each taxi is able to accommodate a wheelchair, which makes movement of disabled persons so much easier.
One of the places I had never been to is the British Museum.
One of the most famous residents of the the museum is the "Rosetta Stone". It was discovered near the mouth of the Nile river. It was reused in another ancient building. The significance is that when discovered in the 1700's it contained three translations of the same material on one stone. Finally hieroglyphics could be read.
This part of the museum is so classic. It is laid out to explain the areas of collection the Victorians concentrated on. If you collect anything, this is the mother lode.
They have random items displayed, such as a platypus and hummingbird nest that Captain Cook brought back from Austrailia. It is just really cool that history is all cataloged.
i
I got really excited that they had a lot of the early British navigational instruments.
Having been a Navigator in the Air Force, this was really interesting to me.
This is a basic boy scout compass from 1721. They obviously have gotten a lot smaller but the Chinese were centuries ahead on this.
One of the early Atrolobes.
Once a clock could be taken to sea, then more precise navigation could take place. There was a competition to invent such a clock. John Harrison was the clockmaker who finally got one to stay accurate. If you want to read a fascinating book about this read: Longitude.
I was happy to find this clock in the museum. (The one below). I bought Kristi a replica of this for our 25th wedding anniversary. Theoretically, you wind it up once a year. We found it will run about 9 or 10 months, so I suppose we will have to rewind it and us when we return.
When we were in Athens we wondered what happened to all the detail from the Parthenon. Well, most of ancient Greece and Egypt that was portable is now in the British Museum. These were the statues from the top end of the Parthenon.
We also visited the National Portrait Gallery
It is an amazing collection of every notable British celebrity.
Below is King George the III, who screwed up his dealings with the colonists and made the United States of America possible.
Kristi was happy to find the recent portrait of HRH Kate.
I thought the one on the left looked a little more royal.
This was Trafalgar Square outside of the National Gallery.
The National Gallery has quite a few impressionists, but the real prize for me was seeing the painting, "The Hay Wain", by John Constable and Turner's "Rain, Steam, and Speed". No photo in a book can do them justice.
This is the old style phone booth. In 1968 I gave Kristi the number of a phone down the street from where I lived in England. When she was visiting in the Netherlands she called me at the right time and I picked it up to hear a voice that sounded so American. I wasn't sure it was the same girl I had left 18 months before since I couldn't detect an accent since I was living in England.
This is that same young stud who truly wasn't thinking about marriage or even dating on his way home from two years in England. Little could I imagine that I would be engaged and married within three months. That is the best decision I have ever made.
