UK 3

We made some new friends in Fetcham and were invited back to cook for them anytime, kinda cool really. I left Fetcham on Sunday and Rick dropped me dropped off in Horley, just north of Gatwick airport at a Best Western there. I met Penny at the train station early evening, she came down from Holmes Chapel after visiting the other part of the family up there. I didn't go because of all the baggage and the transfers we would have had to make including one leg on the London Tube, not fun! Anyway, we had a couple of days in Horley and went up to London on one of them. I love to walk London, one of my favourite places on the planet to walk around, so much to see, the history and all the activity!!! We walked from Victoria station past Parliament and Big Ben,

10 Downing Street, just missed Mr. Cameron, Horse Guards

and then by Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.

Down The Strand past the Savoy Hotel and took the scenic route (the wrong way) to the British Museum. We did stop at the New London Theatre and picked up some decent seats for Warhorse that night. Tough day :)

Now the The British Museum... Most of us have seen the old movies of mummies and the Egyptologists and all, well this is where is all comes from. That and more!!! Penny and I walked up to the a great stone edifice that is “The British Museum” (which is free to enter by the way), left the backpack at the coat check, walked into the main gallery and were immediately blown away by its sheer size, a great round “inner edifice” inside a huge inside space (sorry no pic here). A quick “biffy” stop and we were off to the rooms on the left. We did not get a map and only used the tall standing map in the room, so we knew we were off to Egyptland LOL. The first thing we beheld as we entered the room was the Rosetta Stone!

I was completely over come with emotion as I was seeing with my own eyes one of the “wonders” of archeology, the means of deciphering hieroglyphics to Greek via an intermediary of Demotic text. You know, you read about things and see pictures but nothing prepares you for when you see the “thing” with your own eyes. I just stood there for several minutes and took it in. It was the highlight of the entire museum for me! Then off we walked through all the Egyptian and Assyrian rooms on the ground floor of the museum seeing things 3000-5000 years old. We think in North America we have history at 300-500 years maybe back 1000-1500 but nothing like this…

We wandered the museum for about 5 hours seeing artifacts from 7000 to a few hundred years old. Bone and stone tools, 2000 year old glass, a clock from the mid 16^th century that was still running and playing beautiful tunes with bells.

You could easily spend days in the museum reading all the placards and pouring over all the displays but we only had a few hours and throughly enjoyed it all!

Time to leave the museum and head for the show, “Warhorse”, but first a little pizza and pasta with some red wine at a close by restaurant, it was grand! “Warhorse” is the stage production of the movie from a few years back where the actors are mostly human (some mannequins) and the animals are all puppets with human puppeteers “running” them. The adult horse, Joey, had three men wearing, cabling and poling the legs and all but after a few minutes, it was just as some other friends of ours who had seen it earlier this year said, all you see is the horse. Amazing! The show was superb. The goose puppet pretty much stole the show! Back to Horley late and an early start, 5am, for the airport and a flight to Spain...