Friday in England

Company visit

Friday morning (as early as we could) we took a train into London again. Our first stop was to visit a company that I had worked with in helping them implement our software. We stopped off at the nearest tube station (or so we thought) and wandered around in what I thought was the right direction for a few minutes. Finally, when I got a little concerned that I had not seen any familiar landmarks, I got out a map. As it turns out, we were headed in the wrong direction. We corrected our course and made it there -passing another tube station along the way. Doh! It was nice to finally meet the people I had spent hours on the phone with, but we didn’t stay - after all, we were on vacation

The Tower Of London

Our main purpose for our visit to London this day was to visit the infamous Tower of London. This is probably one of England’s most famous castles, so we had to take a gander. We found a two-for-one entry coupon that ended up saving us about $32.00, so we felt justified.

Once across the old moat (now grass) and into the castle walls, we decided to make our way to the White Tower. This tower was built by William the Conqueror and was now home to a museam of armor, weapons, and other interesting artifacts from ancient England. There was one display on hand for “giant armor” that was built for a man that was 6′9″. Of course, everyone around us (dozens of other tourists) made me stand up next to the sign where I nearly reached the mark for the appropriate height.Everyone thought it was real funny. Ha ha.

One of the other exhibits that is at the Tower of London is the Crown Jewels. We walked inside one of the other towers within the castle and made our way through videos and other displays until we reached a gigantic vault. Once inside, there were moving walkways that carried people past the Crown Jewels. It is amazing to me how ornate those crowns really are. Just one of them must have cost a fortune to decorate. There were many guards watching over the jewels even though they were undoubtedly encased in very thick bullet-proof glass. Despite the many warning signs, tourists still attempted to take pictures and were promptly dealt with by the guards. I wonder why they didn’t allow photography…

After the Crown Jewels, the weather took a turn for the worse. Welcome to London. The rain came down hard and we looked for some shelter. We wandered around from tower to tower and listened to historical tales of betrayal and murder. Eventually we wanted to see another part of the castle that was only accessible by tour. We found one in progress and latched on. The tour guide was very entertaining as he told stories about the old church and about be-headings and divorces. A lot of those kings had quite a colorful past. I made Heather take a picture with a couple of these guides or “Beefeaters” as they were called. As we came to find out, these guys actually lived within the Castle walls. In fact, you could see some of their housing and there were clotheslines and you could even see into some of their living quarters. I thought that that was odd for such a touristy place.

After we had seen just about everything we wanted to see, we decided that we had had enough and that the wet weather was too much, so we headed back to Reading. On our way back, we learned that a birthday dinner for one of my co-workers had been planned that night. Once me made it into Reading, we immediately caught the train into Basingstoke where we met up with everyone for a dinner at the Queen’s Arm pub just outside of the city limits. It’s a fun little country pub with a neat atmosphere (I had actually been there once before the last time I was in England in March). We enjoyed a nice meal. I had bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes) and Heather had a Tanglefoot meat pie.

Preparing to Leave

We eventually made it back into Reading where we spent the night packing. We wanted to make sure that we got most of it done because we had an early morning ahead of us.