We get to London and See a few Sights

Mardi from Austin, and I from Portland, flights converging at Heathrow on a Thursday (10/16/2025), we met up without ado after customs and took a cab to our hotel.  A walk over in front of Buckingham Palace, merry crowds milling about, mild weather. No royals in sight, the guard in non-ceremonial garb.  We are white-haired ladies with a few points of pain, back, foot, baby toe to name a few, but we manage to hobble short distances and rest when we can.

 So tired we slept maybe 12 hours that first night.

Friday Kathryn Mears met us for a walk through the National Portrait Gallery, (favorite portrait:- Toussaint L'Ouverture--painted I think 2009, the guinea hen hat a symbol of liberty as it cannot be tamed)

We lunched with Kathrlyn at the Portrait Gallery Café -(by Richard Corrigan as renowned chef) very yummy and beautiful.  We walked over to the Covent Garden area, and the highlight for me was smelling and getting sprayed by our young mother's eau de parfum, l'Heure bleue of Guerlain.  Notes of iris, jasmine and sandalwood! We walked down to the Thames just after sunset and walked to the middle of the Millenium Bridge.

Some views there:

Saturday ..  After lunch at a funky Korean restaurant, We were lucky to see Les Misérables at the Sondheim Theatre.  The 40th anniversary year of the opening of this musical in London, the cast and production were awesomely spectacular...we had perfect seats and the orchestral music, choral and solo singing so out of this world.  Next to us sat a British woman who said this was the 16th time she had seen it.  The crowd went wild after every dramatic number, or was it every number?

Sondheim Theatre before the show

On Sunday Uber boat sped us past the Shard, the Tower and Tower bridge, St. Paul's and someone searching the low tide shore for treasures, from the Embankment wharf to Greenwich.  The park there is beautiful, big trees -- many of them monster London plane-trees--turning soft yellows and golds, a few reds, many dogs walking humans,  a schnauzer convention even, making Mardi really miss GG...  After visiting the Observatory and all its celestial and time-measuring devices, we deemed it fascinating -- if you love clocks.  We stood with a foot in each hemisphere over the meridian line, and then visited the Queen's house, where a woman in period dress animatedly told us and a family with bright kids --who could answer her engaging questions about the royalty -- fun stories of its complicated history.  We lunched at the cafe there and exited just in time to see the Red Ball rise and drop.