Being a tourist takes it toll on the body. I am pretty sure I have walked about six hundred miles in the past two days. And I feel it.

Today I got lost in London again. This time Steve and I bummed around Kensington. The Natural History Museum seemed like such a good idea but we forgot that it is a Saturday, on a bank holiday weekend, and the building was absolutely flooded with children and parents and strollers and screams and cries and camera flashes. The childish desire to see the dinosaur bones was quickly squashed while we had to queue for ten minutes just to get into the exhibit and spend the next twenty minutes shuffling from board to board. We eventually gave up on the dinosaurs and exited the exhibit as quickly as possible, taking cursory photographs of the most impressive displays and ignoring the informational panels. We will have to depend on Michael Crichton for our dinosaur related data unfortunately. The rest of the museum was the same: kids, crowds, and boring displays. College of the Atlantic students really should not be allowed into museums like this. Through the entire “Ecology” section, I kept shaking my head and talking about how inappropriate the term ‘food chain’ is. I think we scared the children and annoyed the parents.


The Victoria and Albert Museum was just across the road from the Natural History Museum, so we jumped over and relished the quiet, reserved atmosphere. One note on the V & A Museum: Go. It is fantastic. If my feet didn’t hurt, I could have spent all day there. Everything in it is interesting, simple as that. I wandering mostly through the nineteenth century section, which I think contained everything that a noble family could have needed in Great Britain at that time. I am thinking of a way to get back there and wander some more. They also had a huge collection of old books (I did a quick look for apple books, but no luck), stools for public use around the museum, and study spaces peppered throughout, which I thought was really great. Occasionally the exhibits would open up to a circular room with collections of comfy chairs, desks, computers, and books on the history of the museum, the city, and the exhibits, and it appeared anyone was welcome to sit there all day and read and work. Fantastic. Go there.


After the V & A Museum, we decided that we needed to go to Kensington Gardens, despite the black clouds looming on the horizon. We trudged along the city streets until, suddenly, black and gray switched to green and pink and white and brown. The gardens were absolutely gorgeous; there is no way I can describe how amazing. I insisted that we walk to the Peter Pan statue so I could have my dorky moment. And I was incredibly dorky. I am pretty sure Steve was thoroughly bored with listening to me talk about how I was really happy they put the Never-Bird on the statue and not all the Darling family. After my ten minutes of statue-staring, we plopped ourselves under a couple of trees and watched the petals fall, coating all the grass in pastels and permeating the air with their aroma. If it didn’t start to rain, we would have fallen asleep. I can understand why Barrie had Peter Pan living with the fairies in the gardens.

Steve and I managed to get back to the flat we are staying at by a Thames ferry, which was fun but wet. A night of Chinese Takeaway and reading, followed by a morning of work in the park near the flat tomorrow. We also just discovered the Camden Crawl, which we will be visiting tomorrow evening. Should be fun.. more to come!