…as many of my adventures do. London was my first foreign metropolis. I went there as a kid with my grandfather and had a great amount of freedom to wander and fall in love with the city. It was Suzi’s and my first stop overseas as very newly married couple and I loved being able to show Suzi the city I fell in love with. Then it was our kids’, their first European landfall. It was where Kevin discovered he could read, sounding out the names of tube stations, although “Knights’ Bridge” was bit confusing. Then it was my mother, we took her there for the first time on her 80h birthday and discovered it anew through her eyes.
For more than 60 years it has been an adventure and a shelter when Suzi and I needed to escape to a place where we could operate in English, watch movies and plays and not have the stress of fear of being misunderstood.
And now a new adventure, we are going on two back to back cruises on Prinsendam, a Holland America ship being taken out of service on July 1. The first cruise is “Celtic Explorer” that will take us to the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Whales, Scotland, a couple of stops in the Hebrides and Ireland and a few stops in the low countries before winding up on Amsterdam. OK Dover where we get on the ship but London is where we landed and spent our ‘jet lag’ time visiting old friends and haunts. I wonder at how the city has changed over 60 years. The skyline with its Shards and Gherkins and the architecture of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster added to Christopher Wren and Gilbert Scott.
Here are a few pics from London.
