7/29: Fun and Easy Week in London

This is Mike, again. I drew Friday as my blog day after a very relaxing week in London. I’m going to go through today quickly, and then go backwards to provide the perspective of Simone and me on the previous four days.

This morning, we met up with friends whom I expect Kiera to write about - they were our neighbors in NYC before moving back to London; they’re very close to Alex; and, Kiera just went to camp with the nine-year-old girl whom she’s been friends with since they were younger than Ryan is now.) We saw the changing of the guard (one of the pictures) and got some Nando’s for lunch before saying goodbye. From there, the five of us went to the science museum. Ryan wanted to see the dinosaur exhibit in the natural history museum, so he and I left the science museum early to do it. (There’s a picture.)

In the evening, we went to Granary Square, which I hadn’t heard of before this week. It’s a couple blocks north of King’s Cross. The kids played in fountains (picture); we watched some of an outdoor screening of “The Sound of Music” on a screen over a canal; and we strolled around in a really cool area.

Before the pandemic and in maybe the nine months before our trip, there’ve been stretches of multiple weeks when I didn’t get to see the kids as much as I wanted to. That hasn’t really existed on this trip because each of the three of them has been with at least one of us for every hour except for maybe 5-6 hours in Rome nearly a month ago. But then this week, they went to camp from Monday through Thursday. They loved it, but so did Simone and I. Also, Simone and I each went out three out of four nights (though just two of those nights together when my goddaughter’s preschool teacher babysat). Anyway, sans kids, we made it to the Churchill War Rooms and the V&A Museum (there’s a picture with both parts of one of the two replicas of Trajans Column that Napoleon commissioned) on two of the days the kids were in camp. We can’t think of a comparable in the US to the Churchill War Rooms — Pearl Harbor and the Intrepid don’t quite seem like apples-to-apples. Though I’m not going to include the picture, I got a photo of Churchill’s Croix de Guerre medal. It’s the highest medal France awards to foreigners, and my dad is very proud that his father (26 years-old on D-Day) was awarded this medal (by Charles de Gaulle, personally). But, my dad keeps his dad’s Croix de Guerre in a drawer whereas England put Churchill’s in a big display case (with a ton of other medals).

The nights this week were pretty fun, too. One evening, I joined a team building event that Prove’s (formerly, Payfone’s) London office was doing. (There’s a picture from a cooking class where we were preparing beef Wellington. I mistakenly always had confused beef Wellington with Salisbury steak, but I won’t now.) Last night, we had dinner with my business school friends (pictured), and it was really a blast.

In our trip planning, we had a lot of tradeoffs to consider and debate. The most recurring was that a slow pace costs destinations and a faster pace costs precious energy of children. We’ll have been in London for 12.5 days (gross three day trips) when we leave and our kids will have been in camp for just those four days. Maybe our second to last draft itinerary had us in London for 16 days and the kids in camp for twice as much time. I’m still not sure what we should’ve done. Edinburgh would’ve been the cost to come here earlier (and we would’ve hit some Rome-like heat), but I learned that Edinburgh’s one of my favorite cities. On the other hand, we’re depending on our London time to be fresh for the August part of our trip (Germany, Prague, and Spain in a heatwave, probably). Also, I think that other than our families, London might offer more of everything I love about New York than New York does. (Or, we’re here in the summer, and it’s just especially pleasant.) Anyway, that’s it for musings, closing memories of London, and what we did today. I think that my next blog post will be from our first full day in Munich.