Litóhoro, Pieria, Greece, Friday evening, 8 September 2000
On Saturday, our last full day in London, Stas again went by train to Tunbridge Wells, but first we all went to Saint Paul's. As at Canterbury cathedral, they had taken the step from suggesting donations to exacting an admission price from tourists, and a rather steep one at that, nor bated a groat for our being entirely excluded from the central and eastern portions of the church on account of a wedding. I was decidedly put out, but the children declared that this was their favorite of all the cathedrals, partly on account of the wedding and partly I suspect on account of the unprecedented brevity of our visit.
When we split up I took the children to the Tower, where they did a sort of scavenger hunt or quiz, such as they had come to enjoy at Wilton House and Penshurst Place--after a very bad introduction to the genre at The Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. The children decided to skip the Yeoman Warder guided tour, experience having taught us not to expect other tourists to make allowances for their short stature in such contexts. I filled in as best I could from memory. We also skipped the crown jewels, for similar reasons and also for lack of time, since the children had also elected that day to go to the Regent's Park zoo.
When we left the Tower the neighborhood looked unpromising for lunch, so we proceeded by Underground to the Regent's Park station, emerging there to find a neighborhood still less promising in that respect. We had to walk a considerable way for a restaurant, and I pointed out Harley Street to the children, our glimpse of doctor-land complementing our visit to lawyer-land the day before. The Regent's Park tube station is plenty far from the zoo, but the restaurant we finally found was even farther, so after lunch I hailed a taxi. When we left the zoo, though, we walked all the way back to the tube station, along a long series of long and very posh and elegant cream-yellow park-front terraces.
When I brought the children back from all these outings at nearly half past six, having spent nearly eighty pounds on admission charges that day, I tried to save about forty by bringing the car up out of the Bloomsbury Square underground lot and parking on the street. In this I was acting on the advice of our hotel staff, one of whom had assured me that parking on the street was free and permissible after that time each evening and also all day Sunday. This was outdated information, though, according to the officer way up north in Kentish Town to whom I paid eighty-five pounds the following noon to get the car unbooted. Larissa accompanied me to Kentish town and back, and her company plus the fantasy of donating a matching eighty-five pounds to the Irish Republican Army enabled me to stay cheerful through this trial.
On Sunday, other than that little adventure, we merely did laundry and finished packing and made our way to Heathrow Airport for our late evening flight to Greece. I turned in our car at Heathrow, together with paperwork relating to our accident. There was an odd and seemingly shady bit of business complicating our check-in for the flight, involving reticketing and some extra expense, but we got aboard all right and took off very nearly on time at half past ten in the evening.
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When we split up I took the children to the Tower, where they did a sort of scavenger hunt or quiz, such as they had come to enjoy at Wilton House and Penshurst Place--after a very bad introduction to the genre at The Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. The children decided to skip the Yeoman Warder guided tour, experience having taught us not to expect other tourists to make allowances for their short stature in such contexts. I filled in as best I could from memory. We also skipped the crown jewels, for similar reasons and also for lack of time, since the children had also elected that day to go to the Regent's Park zoo.