Day 12: Travel Day

Welcome

Yesterday we spent our final day in the MAN, driving from Sheffield to Heathrow.


We hit the buffet at full steam yesterday, wolfing down a quick meal to be ready for our 9am departure. For my main course I served up a fried egg on toast, a pair of hashbrowns, brown sauce, cucumber, tomatoes, capsicums, olives, and cream cheese. Alongside this I enjoyed a bowl of fruit salad with natural yoghurt.

The M1 was in fine form as we drove south, mostly smooth with only a few puffs of heavy traffic. But we all know that the M1 exists only to facilitate vehicle movements onto the most innovative and important piece of infrastructure in the history of the isles, M25 the London Orbital Motorway, which yesterday morning allowing us to avoid the horrific possibility that is driving through the London metropolitan area.

Berend pulled into the carpark of our hotel and we unloaded for a final time, making sure to retrieve any small pieces of gear that could have been mixed in with rental equipment. The hotel manager had been nice enough to give us a small storage room on the ground floor, so we moved the heavy cases in there so Bird wouldn’t have to come up and sleep in someone’s room. We said our goodbyes to Berend and Owen and then off they drove, Owen to return to London on the train, and Berend to take the van back to Brussels via the Eurotunnel.

Berend Van Guyse, one of the most skilled reversers we have ever seen, reverses out of the carpark one last time.

So here were at The Moxy in Heathrow with an entire afternoon to kill. I was hoping to be “instantly eased into a playful stay with a *complimentary cocktail to go along with your room key”, but that piece of hospitality hasn’t made it to Heathrow so I suffered through a sober check-in and then spent some time enjoying the lobby. Moxy lobbies “aren’t just for sitting. They’re for hanging out. Taking care of business. And when the sun goes down, turning up the volume”. Despite the large quantities of advertising dross that go along with the existence of a hotel chain like this, I did quite in enjoy spending a few hours in this particular lobby, sitting amongst the décor and trying to put my finger on what they were attempting to express with this vivacious space.

Tristan had an errand to run in London so later in the afternoon we gathered Gabe and set out on the city’s public transport network, beginning with the 222 bus to Hounslow West, and then the Piccadilly Underground Line to Green Park station. From there Tristan made his way to a connecting train while Gabe and I headed to see if anything was happening at Buckingham Palace. The golden fleur-de-lis atop the wrought iron fences that line the grounds of the palace were looking freshly polished, or perhaps they had had a recent gilding, for these metal lilies glistened in the late afternoon sunlight, and their pointy tips were enough to deter me from trying to scale the bars.

I forgot to take a photo of the fence so here is the one from wikipedia.

In the royal roundabout there is a large and impressive statue, The Victoria Memorial, and this one has been even more furiously gilded; wrapped in a golden coating and buffed so bright as to damage someone’s eyes if it caught an unexpected sunray. We watched the pair of Kings Guards for a time and decided that they meant business, and that they were probably capable of operating their weapons proficiently in a hat of any size. It was beginning to rain and we waited to see if they would retreat inside their sentry boxes, but they didn’t, and we left to find shelter.

The author and his favourite clock.

Gabe and I walked north and waded through the crowds in Mayfair and Oxford Circus for a while, visting a couple of shops before it was time to reconvene with Tristan. We all met our friend Amanda at a pub in Soho, and took the time to enjoy what will probably be our final evening in the UK for quite a while. There was quite an early lobby call looming on the horizon so we didn’t stay out very late, catching the Piccadilly line back to our lodgings and doing our best to fall asleep at an early hour.

A K6 telephone box, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott.

Jonathan is happy with his find.

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Day 13: Travel Day

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Day 11: Sheffield