London - Day 5
We wake around 8am for our last full day in London and of the trip. We get ready and take the tube to Euston for breakfast at Pinner Cafe, a proper greasy-spoon. We each order a form of English brekky and as is customary it comes with a loaf of bread on the side. The coffee is instant but the place is cheap and cheerful and lets be honest, its hard to get English breakfast that wrong.
John, who is serving us, is full of banter with the customers as he takes orders and brings food. A quintessential Londoner. Its hard to know if he owns the cafe or if they've hired him to make the customers feel welcome. If its the later, he's worth his salary. He likes that England has left the EU. Likes that they can now do what they want. Admits that he never goes to Europe anyway. Never goes anywhere, really. Sounds like he might have been born in the Pinner cafe. Good guy.
It's been a minute since our last museum visit and while on the nose, we settle on the British Museum (and also because the London history museum is temporarily closed, story of our life on this trip). We rock up and the line is long. It's mainly because of the bag check, which is very thorough. Obviously a concern that people will be coming in to steal the artefacts from them…
Anyway, the entry is free at least and after a half hour line up we're in. It's not as busy as the Louvre but it's definitely popping. We're using chatgpt to guide us around and we can't help but be impressed by all the statues and other treasures we see. You can help but marvel at how they managed to get some of this stuff here, like, did they have a jack-hammer back in the 1800s?
The Roman London section was great. Learning about the Vindolanda tablets was cool, they are some of the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain which gave insight into Roman life in London at the time (~0-100 AD)
OK, one last snide comment: were the added engravings on the sides of the Rosetta Stone really necessary: "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801" and "Presented by King George III"? Surely the person who's been asked to do the engraving must be a little uncomfortable about defacing something 2000 years old.
After a few hours of wandering around it's time for lunch. We hydrate with coconut water and Chipotle for lunch. Feeling revitalised, we're off to an observation deck (22 Horizon) to see London from above. It's an enclosed observation deck on the 58nd floor of a skyscraper and entry is free. It's also not very busy so we're pretty chuffed with this find. The view is cool, like being in a helicopter. Down we go.
The monument to the great fire of London is nearby so we go and check that out. It's in the place where the fire originally started, which used to be a bakery. You can climb to the top of this but we've had our fill of views today and we're just not sure if our poor legs take another stair climb.
Whilst we were up on the observation deck we noticed the Tower Bridge and Tower of London and realised we didn't check those out when we were here at the start of the trip. We head there next and sit and watch the bridge go up and down as a ship passes through. The Tower of London is just about to close for the day so we admire it and the surrounding gardens from the outside.
We don't have anything else left on our list to see or do or in the tank, to be honest. It's like our bodies know it's the last day of the trip and we're feeling completely knackered at this point. We slowly meander along the Thames to the Wapping tube stop to take us back to the airbnb, feeling like we've milked this trip for all we could and that we've left it all out there these past 5 weeks.
Trip Stats, for the nerds:
528,7 KMs total
16.5 KMs average per day