October 24th
We awake early the next morning, as Robin's alarm clock is set for 720. It's not all that much earlier than I'm accustomed to arising, but everyone else is asleep, so once again, I have a chance to catch up on my notes. I've also been doing pretty well on the postcards, and have written all the cards I plan on sending except those I'm going to send from London.
Staying with folks like this is nice in that it's much cheaper than a hotel, and it's nice having a native guide, but being the first one awake like this is kind of a drag. I'm in someone else's house, so I don't feel comfortable making myself at home, so I just sit and write for a while. Before too long, others are waking up, and we all eat a huge breakfast. Yum!
After breakfast, it's time for a quick tour of Bournemouth on the way to the train-station. We take a look at WAM!NET UK's offices (4-Sight was acquired by WAM!NET, the company I worked for last year, and Dave was my manager for a while). Then it's down to the seashore, but it's pouring rain again, so we don't even get out of the car. It's still raining at the train-station, but according to the schedul, we only have fifteen or twenty minutes to wait, so we head for the platform. The train's already there, so we board and get comfortable in first class. First class on this train means compartments, but no service. Sigh. The guard actually stamps our rail-passes (only for the second time, and this is the last time we'll be using them. See the Don't overbuy rail-passes. section of Dave's Travel Tips).
Along the way to London, we stop just after a station, and as I'm about to get up and try to find out
what's going on, we start moving again, but in the wrong direction. Back past the previous station
(Brookwood), ![[Footnote34]](images/foot.gif){kind=small}
and then we're stopped again. It turns out that they're working on the rails, and we need to shuffle
over onto the rails that are normally used by the westbound trains (and we're eastbound). I think
that I'm glad they got the big rail-crash out of the way before we arrived, and that England only
has a rail crash about every two years, so we're probably safe. The biggest annoyance is that it's
once again a non-smoking train, and we're just stuck, with no good idea of how long we're going to
be waiting here. After about an hour of waiting, we're on our way again, and we get to London
with no further problems.
In London, we discover that our train comes into Waterloo Station, which I expected would have an office where we could turn our Tube vouchers into Tube passes, but alas, there's none here, so we buy a ticket to Victoria Station. It means an extra stop on the way to the hotel, but getting the card of infinite riding is good. We've got a bus to the airport on Wednesday, so we can start in on the three-day card today without getting into trouble.
After getting the cards, it's just a short ride to the High Street Kensington station, where we get off the Tube for the walk to the hotel. In spite of having real good directions on how to get there (and it's only a block away), we spend a few minutes standing at the front of the station trying to figure out which street we want to take, since the street I thought we'd be taking is actually the name for another part of the same street. Once again, we're foiled by the rapidly-changing street names.
We get to the Copthorne Tara, and it's a pretty nice-looking place, judging by the lobby. Most importantly to me at this point in the trip, there's a concierge in case there's something we need to do that we can't figure out on our own. When I was booking the trip, I decided on a hotel in London because I was figuring I'd be road-weary, and might want someone else to deal with things for me.
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After dropping the stuff in the room, it's time to be tourists again. We head out for the Cabinet War Rooms to see where Winston Churchill spent most of WWII. On the way, we walk past Westminster Abbey, but somehow neither Brian or I took a single picture of it. I think we figured we could stop back later or something. I want to see the Cabinet War Rooms because I've read Churchill's The Second World War and am interested in the history. The only problem is that they've got the damnable audio-guides here, too. These are the best ones so far, though, having fast-forward and rewind, as well as ways to get more information in just about all of the rooms. And as we go through the tour, I realize that there's no way they could do this with human tour guides. There are too many places that are just too small to have a guide talking to a group of more than two or three people at once. |
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