Round 2! *ding ding*: April 30th - May 6th, 2024
Round 2 of our transatlantic travel started with a flight to London, but in a nice change of pace our flight left late on a Tuesday afternoon instead of early in the morning. I got to replace some broken gauges for my ears, and even convinced Susan to run a few more laps at the Norris Hill in an effort to scrounge up training time in the face of a hectic travel schedule. Luckily we had enough time left over to shower before squeezing into a metal tube for hours.
With the white Subaru crammed full of us and our dedicated entourage of bags, Susan's dad drove us to Eppley and said a sweet goodbye to Maureen. Uneventful flights took us through Chicago and then to London and none of us managed to get much sleep in the accelerated overnight schedule of the plane. All our bags rolled off the carousel and Susan wrangled the heavy grey backpack while I plopped the bright purple giant suitcase (courtesy of Scott's parents) on the floor and Maureen shouldered her own load. Grateful not to have a backpack after my struggles with sciatica while in Omaha, I tugged the purple luggage along behind me as we joined the throngs of confused and groggy tourists slowly tottering around Heathrow's underground exit looking for the proper tube line. Every few minutes I had to switch the suitcase to the other arm and shake out my free hand.
We managed to find the Picadilly line that didn't spiral back to the airport terminals and made a small tower of our bags, happy to get on at one of the first stops. Passengers crowded in and spilled out as we crossed London until finally at our own stop we deconstructed the baggage tower and brought it up to the surface. Of course our lodging sat up a hill so we all started huffing a bit and I switched which arm served as the towline for the purple suitcase a little more often. Maureen asked if I needed to tidy up the floppy laces on my mountaineering boots and I assured her I didn't right before snagging the boots together and falling nearly on my face. We still managed to treat each other pretty nicely despite the jetlagged grumpiness cultivated while being routed thousands of miles through a series of tubes, a good sign for the upcoming journeys.
At the apartment our host greeted us kindly but a bit reservedly; I couldn't tell if it was the typical British reservedness or a small amount of fright at the idea of us schlepping all the luggage up the flights of narrow stairs leading to our small but ample attic room. But we made it around the tight corners and all the bags found space, even if Maureen did have to take some of the stairs backwards on the way down after a long day-plus of travel. After a trip to the supermarket and a classic travel dinner of "carbs/veggies/protein" we all eagerly took turns with the shower and sank into bed.
We'd done ourselves the kindness of taking a few days in London, enough to readjust after travel, see a few sights, and take care of the everpresent logistics that complicate a long international trip built around outdoor sports. So while Maureen took Thursday morning to head to the city and appreciate her new surroundings, Susan and I went straight to our storage unit in the hopes of finding something familiar. And behold! We pulled open the door for the first time in 6 months to find our sweet bikes exactly as we left them - upside down, in the midst of scattered panniers and climbing equipment, dusted with baking soda to ward off evil spirits.
Some minor prep work on the bikes got mine ready to ride and revealed that Susan had one tubeless tire that wouldn't hold air and a stuck hub on the rear wheel that meant the wheel wouldn't spin without the pedals also turning. Which was fine, since the bike mechanic was up a steep hill and Susan would need to pedal the whole time anyway. And we noticed the questionable state of Susan's tires, starting to crack a little and with the rear one nearly bald from being overloaded for 4 straight months last year, but that was also fine, because we didn't have *super* long distances to bike during our Scotland itinerary.
Up Muswell Hill sat a bike shop where we'd booked service times weeks in advance, and even re-confirmed a few days before. Yet the technician, anxious at being so vastly outnumbered by the 2-wheeled vehicles he was supposed to be servicing, curtly told us of his confusion and jotted down a few notes while we reexplained our mechanical woes. He said he'd do his best to get the work done by Saturday; we left with a vague sense of uneasiness but without any better options.
From there we hopped on the tube to meet Maureen and had a small coffee in Leicester Square while she told us about her morning bopping around to see several parks and monuments. Together we ambled over to the British Museum, which Susan and I visited last October but really only saw a portion of a fraction. This time around we spent most of the day in the east and south Asian exhibits, oohing and ahhing at the exquisite craftsmanship of Chinese porcelain and jade and the intricate sculptures of Buddhist India. As if that didn't remind us enough of Britain's former global reach (having checked out Egyptian and Middle-Eastern plunder during our last visit), we also found a Moai statue and totem pole from the northwest coast Haida people on display. They sure got around.
But we also popped upstairs to see a few less "exotic" exhibits, such as the Lewis chessmen (which might actually belong to Norway I guess) and a whole section of British clocks. One clock in particular used the calibrated motion of a metal ball rolling along a track every 30 seconds to tick its hands, and I sat mesmerized longer than I should have. We lingered in the museum until security started closing rooms and generally herding visitors outside. An errand to pick up a SIM card on the way home led us past some art installations where the walls and ceilings of large boxy rooms were covered in massive screens. We stopped to take a shower in emojis and gawk at kaleidoscopic animals - Omaha can't compete with these big-city amenities.
The next day we woke up early, caught the tube, and found our tour bus for Stonehenge under grey clouds and a light drizzle. As the coach found the highway and cruised out of the city the skeletons of dozens of construction cranes towered among the skyline in all directions. It was an unguided tour but our wrangler on the bus did give us some interesting tidbits during the ride - the massive stones were carried a long way, likely from Wales, they aligned precisely with the sun during the solstices, and long story short most of the historical details are scant and mysterious.
Dropped off at the entrance, we stayed mostly warm enough during the walk over to the henge itself as the rain continued lightly. The audio guide on my phone explained a few other features that I might have otherwise mistaken for the natural earth, such as the ceremonial ditch leading to the monument and the barrow mounds rising roundly off to the side. The dark stones rose suddenly, juxtaposed at hard angles against the level green of the neatly manicured lawn. The path traced a circular perimeter around the rings of Stonehenge (they don't allow tourists to get up close and among the stones any more) and took us by the Heel Stone, which marked the official entrance by which processions would come and go for important solstice ceremonies (presumably). Maybe I've played too much Civilization in my youth, but at first the monument seemed smaller and less impressive than the "world wonder" I'd been expecting in my head. But the longer we lingered the more I imagined unknown ancient peoples taking years to quarry, haul, arrange, and stand these multi-ton blocks of the Earth with only rudimentary tools, and I tried to tap into the awe someone a few generations removed from the effort must have felt standing among the construction for the first time, so alien amid the flat Salisbury Plains of southern England, and I appreciated more and more the chance to consider the last 6000 years of humanity in a sacred place.
We used up our 3 hours of tour time without much difficulty and filed onto the coach for the ride back into London. The bus picked up and let off right next to the Victoria & Albert Museum, so we took the chance to pop in there for a few hours before closing. The imposing stone architecture, blocky but adorned with flowing sculptures and reliefs, housed an array of ornate religious artifacts and more loot from around the world, ivory and marble and gilded silver and gold. But in an interesting twist they also had a hall of plaster casts, British archeologists having decided at some point (or having been told) that maybe they couldn't take everything they wanted. But the masses still needed exposure to culture, so instead they took detailed plaster casts of sculptures and monuments ranging David to Trajan's Column (the second Trajan's Column replica we've seen on this trip) and put them all on display. Honestly a pretty decent idea.
Saturday we had a full schedule, starting with a tour of St. Paul's cathedral. St. Paul's is the seat of the Bishop of London and one of the biggest and most important sites of the Anglican church. There's been a church on the site for nearly 1500 years but the current building dates to the early 1700's, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, and somehow survived the Blitz during the 40's. The massive central dome, supported by a ring of sturdy square columns, hulks over a rotunda whose decorative inlay is best appreciated from far above; the humbling scale of the architecture ranked right along with any of the renowned, impressive sites we'd seen so far. Highly detailed decorations capped the columns and filigreed the edges around the domes, while intricate mosaics sparkled above, striking a balance between the depeopled geometric motifs of an Islamic mosque and the shining gold portraits gaudily lining an Orthodox cathedral.
A little differently, this church also featured prominent memorials to military heroes such as the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Lord Nelson, and the crypt below seemed to have a new general or admiral around every corner. None of the memorials seemed to value peace, though; instead they all seemed to glorify the valor of men who had gone out to kill their fellow men, which struck us as a bit inconsistent for a purportedly Christian cathedral. Another, much more amusing, difference was that they had stairs open that led to the upper gallery of the dome and then all the way to the small tower on top. So we eagerly trudged up some 500+ stairs to get some splendid views of the main rotunda on the inside and the London skyline on the outside.
After the cathedral we were off to the Tate Modern art museum, one of our favorite London attractions from last time, to while away the rest of the day until it was time for an evening show at the Globe Theater (one of our favorite London combos!). Susan and I went to some galleries we hadn't gotten to before, mainly works in mixed media, while Maureen strolled through some of the classic exhibits.
Going out for dinner helped replenish some of our energy, but after a decently long day I think we were all unsure about standing for several hours to watch "Much Ado About Nothing" - then again, who can argue with 5 pound groundling tickets? The cast performed with such exuberancy and brought plenty of the playfulness we expected from a comedy at the Globe, so it was easy enough to forget about tired feet lost in laughter at the antics of Shakespeare's young lovers. We got to appreciate the lighting of landmarks along the waterfront during our late walk home, although my cramping feet told me my new shoes needed a bit more breaking in.
Despite the (relatively for us) late night we had plenty to do on Sunday, starting with checking out of the Airbnb and ending with a night train to Fort William, Scotland. In between... was a big question mark. We spent plenty of time at the storage unit, Susan and I packing and prepping bags to carry all of our equipment around on bikes for the next three weeks, and all three of us leaving everything stashed there while we ambled away the rest of the day. Conveniently enough a big farmer's market was going on next door in Alexandra Park, so that gave a great opportunity to pass the time eating and window shopping. We got to introduce Maureen to the wonder of halloumi fries!
Eventually it got close enough to a reasonable time to show up at the train station, so we worked out with Maureen how to get there via public transport, helped her board a bus, and waved goodbye. We just needed to walk up to Muswell Hill, pick up the bikes, roll back to Safestore, load up the bags, and pedal down to Euston station ourselves. We arrived in the bike shop a bit after 3 and found it just as chaotic as before, and the mechanic working today didn't have any clue which bikes were ours or what work they needed done. Not a good sign. In his words, sometimes his partner doesn't communicate very well what they take in and what jobs are supposed to happen. He did manage to locate our bikes in the leaning jumbles that lined the sides of the shop... and then confirmed that they hadn't been touched yet. Yikes.
But to his credit he asked us about the most critical issues and said he'd take care of them right away, while we waited. I discovered a broken spoke shortly before we stored the bikes last October, so he swapped that out and trued the wheel in less time than it takes me to change an innertube. Susan told him about the stuck hub and after some investigating the mech confirmed it was shot and that it was cheaper and quicker to just get a new wheel wholesale than to try to fix it. He pulled an appropriate one from the ceiling, swapped Susan's disc brake, cassette, and tire onto it, and had her set up pretty dang quickly (luckily this also solved her problem with one of the tubeless tires not holding air, since this wheel needed a tube anyway).
All this was interspersed with other customers coming in and needing things, so when we got out of the shop with two basically functional bikes a little after 4 PM we felt pretty good about our timing. A quick roll down the hill took us back to a suspiciously empty Safestore facility. The locked front door and dark office told us no one was in. Our little key fob wouldn't open the access door. We always knew that this place only allowed access during business hours... we just hadn't kept very good tabs on when business hours were. Sure enough, on Sunday, this particular Sunday, adjacent to a "bank holiday", the facility closed at 4 PM. We'd missed it by 15 minutes.
Our hearts sank. All we had were the bikes, the clothes on our backs, and thankfully our wallets and my phone. *But damn*. What would we do with literally all of our belongings on this side of the Atlantic locked up in an inaccessible storage locker? What about the train we were supposed to take in 3 hours? Panic set in. I called the security number but they assured me there was absolutely no way to access the unit until the next day at 8 AM. Well... we couldn't go to Scotland with only our clothes and bicycles. I checked and there were still tickets available for the train the next night. We could get a hotel for an acceptable amount of money back up Muswell Hill. After nearly $400 the 15 minutes by which we missed the storage unit was easily the most expensive quarter-hour of the trip.
Still, all it took to fix the mistake was money, so we weren't totally hosed. Maureen had wi-fi at the train station so we were able to tell her we wouldn't make it and crossed our fingers she'd find somewhere to stay in Fort William. We walked to a market to pick up some ramen for dinner (hotel rooms in the UK always come with a kettle for making tea) and I begged a phone charger off the host at the hotel desk. British game shows kept us company while we anxiously reviewed our budget and then drifted off to sleep.
The next morning we showed up at the storage unit in clothes we'd worn for one day too long and definitely looked suspicious using their bathroom to do things like brush teeth and comb hair (since all our toiletries had been locked up all night). Taking very good note of the hours, we found a chill cafe to spend a couple hours in before shifting to Alexandra Park for a few more. With plenty of cushion before closing time we did all the steps we were supposed to do 24 hours earlier and started trundling towards Euston station, one more aggravating bike shop experience behind us.
At Euston was another couple hours of waiting, until finally 6:30 came around and we could board the train. After obligatory confusion over which bike carriage our bikes belonged in (turned out we'd need to wake up at about ~3 AM, gather the bikes and bags, and change trains) and obligatory struggling with the different type of bike rack and loading system in this train, we wandered down the aisle and found the thinly-padded, stiff-backed chairs that would be our home for the night (sleeper cabs are inordinately expensive and this was already the second time we'd bought these tickets). It took two hours just to get out of London, including a weird 1-hour stop in a random train-yard that made us paranoid we'd somehow boarded the wrong train, and Susan and I wondered if they stretched out the journey just for the sake of having a night train.
We did our best to curl up or lean or otherwise get comfortable enough for sleep in the chairs that didn't recline so much as just slide the seat portion forward. It was less noisy and smoother than a long flight, but that just made the occasional screeches and shudders even more jarring, and I felt like it was harder to sleep on this train than on a flight. Good thing my motion sickness mostly lets me read on trains.
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