At Last in London

1 August 2018     Wednesday

We’re in London! Yeah! And why am I so happy to be in London? Well, it is a major world capitol, with lots of cool stuff. And that’s a good reason to be glad to be in London.

Here's a couple of photos of our new digs. We're in the Notting Hill district of west London (we watched that movie last night. I got all I needed out of the first five minutes). It's a very cute area, reminiscent of certain Victorian neighborhoods in San Francisco (built in the time of Queen Victoria... gee, who copied whom?) 

Home for the next month. That's our garrett window on the top right.

View out our garrett window as night falls over London...

But that’s not the immediate reason I’m content to be here. I am pleased to be in London because it marks the end of our eight-week odyssey that started the first week of June, in Bergen, Norway. We traveled by train and bus to the Seven Cities, then flew from Amsterdam to Glasgow and drove for two weeks through Scotland, including several days on the incomparable Isle of Skye, ending with a week in Edinburgh. Then a week in England’s Lake District, a couple days each in Newcastle on Tyne and York (dripping with history), and finally to here, the capital of capitals. Now we have a whole month to explore, and -- finally -- to digest all that has happened since leaving Spain.

Lots of catching up to do, certainly. Since we left Alicante on June 7^th we’ve been on the road for 55 days, and have visited seven countries with 18 stops of two nights or more. Two thousand miles by plane, 1100 by train, almost 1200 by car (all on the wrong side of the road, note!), 390 by bus, and 22 by ferry (to and from Iona in Scotland). Oh, plus an average of over 10,000 walking steps per day for each of us (around 4‑1/2 miles average; some days much more!) So, yeah. Glad to be in one spot for a while.

In the coming weeks we’ll be writing blogs on Scandinavia and the incredible Nordic light (not the northern lights; that’s even further north, and a wintertime phenomenon), Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh, for starters. Plus I imagine we’ll be talking about London some, too.

In the meantime, some representative photos of what we're calling the Seven Cities...

Bergen, Norway, our first stop

The stunning Oslo opera house. Or maybe a glacier? 

Stockholm

Gothenburg, Sweden, very much a sea-going city!

Copenhagen

Hamburg was a real surprise. This part of the Miniatur Wunderland, an astonishing model of much of the world, accurately recreates Hamburg's warehouse district (the Wunderland itself is in the second building from the right).

And finally, Amsterdam. What else needs to be said?