London Day 7

Once again I would like to apologize that it has been nearly two months since my return, and I am still not finished with this series of blogs. After I am finished with these, hopefully early next week, I plan on blogging daily, or nearly daily. This will include many short entries, but will be a more effective way for me to communicate with my viewing audience (all three of you).

I would like to warn you in advance that this is my longest entry to date due to what an amazing day on the trip this turned out to be.

Day 7

Day seven began like every other day, which means we woke up far too early and ate a shitty breakfast. After we successfully filled our stomachs with dry croissants, we got back on the bus with our favorite pint sized tour guide, Madeline Rainbow, and went on a 45 minute cruise to Windsor Castle.

For those of you who don’t know, Windsor Castle is one of the Queen’s three official residences (along with Buckingham Palace, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh), and it just so happened that the Queen was there on that day. The castle is huge! They show you where the original section of the castle was constructed, and then you look at the different sections that were added on with specific types of stone, in specific styles of architecture throughout the ages. All the additions to the castle over the years formed into the enormous and beautiful fortress that we know today as Windsor Castle.

The inside of the castle was just as impressive, if not more impressive than the outside. The first part that we checked out was called the State Apartment. You could tell immediately that this would not be a good place to stage an attack, because the walls of several rooms in this section of the castle were completely covered with different styles of guns, knives, swords, spears, and other more unconventional weapons. Other rooms were less intimidating, but equally impressive with extravagant portraits of kings and nobles. One of these rooms was called the King’s Closet, but resembled a conference room at a convention center much more than a closet. We were also able to see two different knighting halls where nobles are officially inducted into knighthood.

The other two indoor attractions at the castle were slightly disappointing compared with the State Apartments. There was a large chapel, aptly named St. George’s Chapel, which was basically a poor mans version of Westminster Abbey. It had some nice architecture, and is the burial site of such important people in history as King Henry VIII and Thomas Hobbes, but it lacks the mystique of Westminster Abbey. The other indoor attraction, The Queen’s Dollhouse, was not much of an attraction at all. It really was just a big dollhouse behind a glass case. I stayed in that room for all of ten seconds before I went back outside.

Sometime during all this nonstop action, we found the first and only Palace Guard (The guy’s in red who aren’t allowed to move) that was not behind a fence. We decided that it was essential that we take a picture next to this guard as it may end up being our only opportunity to do so (it was). As we were taking these pictures the guard switched his gun to his other shoulder, and slammed the butt on the floor effectively scaring the shit out of me and Amber. When we turned around we noticed that the stone face guard had a big shitfaced grin across his face. Amber turned around and said “You aren’t allowed to smile,” and like magic, the grin disappeared from his face.

After the castle me and Jill Bohnker broke off from the group and took the tube to Colindale to visit the Royal Air Force Museum (RAF for short). I need to give her some props here, because I really wanted to see this museum, but nobody else did, so she took one for the team and skipped a day of shopping to go with me. Hooray Jill.

Colindale turned out to be much farther away than we had originally anticipated and the 45 minute train ride actually took us outside of the area in which our tube passes worked. In order to get out of the station we actually had to get close to other people and slip out behind them. We made the ten minute walk and arrived at the museum. I have always been fascinated by airplanes of all kinds and the large collection of planes was an incredible sight to behold. I would compare it to SAC Museum on steroids; it had a large variety of WWII fighters and bombers to go along with the more modern planes from more recent times. On our way out we realized that there was another large hanger building solely devoted to the Battle of Britain, which was even cooler than the main museum, but unfortunately we did not have enough time to really investigate that section of the museum thoroughly.

We left the museum and slipped back into the tube station and took a quick visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It had lots of statues and figurines from other cultures and had a section on the evolution of fashion that I reluctantly went through with Jill (she did go see airplanes with me). We then went to try and find the temple church, which is featured in the Da Vinci Code. We found out later that we actually went past it on our way to take pictures by some random church that we thought was the Temple Church. A passerby told us that the church we did take pictures in front of contained the first clock with a second hand, but I am skeptical about the validity of that statement because the church appeared to be fairly new.

We were supposed to meet up with the entire group at the Hard Rock Café at 7:00 PM; however, you should never expect to be on time anywhere while traveling with a Bohnker. So after accidentally going to the Hard Rock Casino, three miles away from the café, we finally met up with the group approximately 30 minutes after the designated arrival time. This particular Hard Rock Café was actually the original Hard Rock, and it definitely was a very interesting place to hang out. It was chalk full of music memorabilia and had rock music playing in the background. I bought a drink called a hurricane, which was very, very good, and a bacon cheeseburger that was very, very, overpriced.

During our meal the owner of the restaurant, who bore a strong resemblance to a Motley Crue roadie, came and visited with our group for a short time and said he had a surprise for us after dinner. We all thought he was blowing smoke, and after dinner we went next door to the Hard Rock Store where we were to receive our free souvenir glasses. In the shop everyone was singing, dancing, taking silly pictures, and in general making fools of ourselves, when Jimmy, the owner guy, came in. He asked us if we wanted to see the vault and of course, we said yes. We had no idea what the vault would contain, or even if it actually existed, but we followed Jimmy downstairs where he unlocked a giant metal door and brought us into the surprise highlight of our trip. The vault turned out to be full of super rare and valuable rock music memorabilia such as: a custom made guitar played by Jimmy Hendrix, John Lennon’s trademark spectacles, an outfit worn by a member of The Clash, and guitars played by Curt Cobain, B.B. King, Keith Richards, and many other rock gods. Seeing these relics of music history would have been cool enough, but we were allowed to touch, hold, and pose for pictures with the majority of the artifacts. My personal favorite picture was when I put on Curt Cobain’s white sunglasses and slung his guitar around my shoulder.

After the nearly religious experience we experienced beneath the Hard Rock Store, a few of us revisited Platform 9 ¾ so the people who were unable to the previous night could pose for pictures. We then took the tube back to the hotel where we were scheduled to have a round table sort of meeting, and exchange personal stories and highlights from the trip thus far. This meeting consisted mostly of us rubbing the fact that we held Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar in Larry’s face.

My final activity of the night was somewhat of a buzz kill, but I packed very light and had to do a small amount of laundry in order to have clothes that did not smell strongly of BO for the remaining three days of our trip. After laundry I went to bed and prepared for the next day.