Since I’m operating on fumes, this will be relatively short.
The traffic from Maryland to JFK was predictably hideous, but once we were at the airport, things proceeded pretty smoothly. Our flight was with Virgin Atlantic that has this bidding process to upgrade seats. This was too weird and annoying, so we were stuck with our squishy regular economy seats. The first Bad Omen was the appearance of a baby sitting immediately behind us. Our first thought: “Oh here we go. This is how our next adventure starts going downhill.”
Amazingly enough, we didn’t hear one peep from the baby all night, nor did she fuss during the landing. All in all, she had a much better night than I did (as usual, no sleep for me). So maybe this was a Good Omen?
At least this time we had no connection to catch, so when everything took forever after we disembarked the plane, we didn’t care.
The hotel managed to get us into a room before 3:00, which was great. We had lunch in the hotel’s pub while our room was set up, and then we took a 45 minute nap to take the edge off the exhaustion before heading off to our Buckingham Palace tour.
I had booked this tour because I had heard that the Viking “Royal Households” tour would be immediately filled up (which indeed it was). Booking a tour directly through the Palace website was easy enough. The website mentioned that if you need the special accessible entrance, you would need to call ahead. But the entrance was only 6 steps up, and the exit 3 steps down; I didn’t need an elevator for that. What was NOT mentioned was the 47 steps up the grand staircase. That does require a bit more help, with lifts here there and everywhere, with names to be recorded, and lanyards to wear, all very British, and super confusing.
The most annoying thing was the prohibition of all photographs inside the palace.
The palace was pretty crowded when we got there at 5:00 p.m., but as we slowly made our way through the tour with our excellent included audio guides, the crowds began to thing. The business with the elevators took extra time; by the time we were at the last two rooms we were almost the only people left, actually running out of time before the palace closed.
There was a special exhibit focused on the recent coronation of King Charles III – a display of the robes and clothes the King and Queen wore that day. It was actually quite stunning – the king’s robes and the queen’s dress were much more beautiful and almost magical in person than what appeared on TV. The king’s robes included ermine – which I finally googled to find out that the ermine is in the weasel family that has a white winter coat with a black tip to the tail. The king’s robes are made of ermine tails, apparently to signify “purity”.
After the inside tour, we exited into the garden in the back of the palace, where we could take photos.
And then there was this little guy, who did not respond to “here, puppy! here puppy!”
When we exited the palace, it was now after 7:30 p.m.- we had spent almost 2 1/2 hours on the tour. Well worth it! And we were now twice as far away from the hotel from when we started.
We Ubered back to the hotel (it worked well this time – in 2019 it did not work well at all).
We were too tired to figure out any place exciting to eat dinner, so we had something light in the hotel’s bar? cafe? Whatever it was, it worked.
Ok, I’m done.
Tomorrow: We figure out what the heck we’re doing for the day and the theater in the evening (“A Strange Loop” – won the Tony for best new musical a couple of years ago).
Maryland Meshugas 