Wednesday, October 17, 2018

London, England

Back for another trip.

This time Tracy and I are heading to the OCR World Championships just outside of London, England, just north of Brentwood at the Nuclear Races headquarters.

Tracy and I had a 10:30pm flight from Calgary on British Airways. My brother Darren drove us to the airport, after we drove to his place and left our car there.

Uneventful flight to London, but we both hardly slept on the plane.

We took the Underground from Heathrow to King's Cross and got checked into our hostel late in the afternoon.

Not too much to report, we went to an English pub for a supper, but no booze for us days before the races! Just food. No servers here, we had to order our food at the bar, and then they deliver it to your table when it's ready. No tipping is needed here either.

After supper, we wandered around. An old church had signs for a "crypt gallery"...our interest piqued, we wandered around the back of the church, and it ended up that a bunch of people were setting up a somewhat macabre art exhibition in the basement of the chuch, in the old crypts. They were not yet open, but I mentioned we weren't going to be here for the weekend, so he took us on a partial tour of what they had setup anyway, which was kinda nice.

St. Pancras International Train Station, which is celebrating it's 150th anniversary, with a newly restored building, was quite fabulous to wander around. It's very trendy, lots of shops and restaurants now live in the train station (along with the trains).

At the last minute, I remembered that King's Cross was the station featured in Harry Potter (Platform 9 3/4 anyone?), so we visited the platform 9 3/4 and the tourist shop attached to it. I'm indifferent to Harry Potter, but Tracy is a big fan. We will be checking out the real Harry Pottery exhibit when we are back in London next week.

We were both dead tired from our flight, so made it back to the hotel shortly after 8:00. Tomorrow we are making our way to Liverpool Street station and getting a train to Brentwood.

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