Tuesday: Back to London

On Tuesday we awoke and boarded the bus for the return trip to London (about 1 1/2 hours). We headed for the Notting Hill neighborhood and Portobello Road, an area with numerous boutiques, restaurants, and antique stores, for some lunch and shopping. Then it was off to the London Eye. We arrived to discover that the Eye was closed for maintenance. ???? Fortunately, just when we were looking to take a swim in the Thames instead, it reopened. We had our own private pod--brilliant.



By the end of the Eye experience, everyone was relatively comfortable and we all captured some images of London from above despite the continued grim weather pattern.


After the Eye, we took the bus back for re-check-in at the Ibis Earls Court and to change for the evening's festivities. We took the bus to Covent Garden, arriving around 4:30PM. Covent Garden might best be described as the London version of Quincy Market: a sprawling, indoor-outdoor shopping area with shops, restaurants, and street performers in the London theatre district.

It was here that half of our group bid farewell to Angie and Terry, since 13 of us attended the show Chicago at the Cambridge Theatre and would take the tube back to the hotel afterwards. The other half of the group rejoined Terry and Angie at 5:30 at the motorcoach to head towards Shepherd's Bush to attend a second football match. Since I was part of group two, the narrative henceforth is a bit incomplete.

We arrived in the Shepherd's Bush area and wandered around looking for somewhere to eat as we headed in the direction of Loftus Road, the home stadium for the Queens Park Rangers football club, a team that has been around since 1882. We arrived at the park to find that the layout seemingly forced all 17,000 fans to enter the ground through the same turnstile. Eventually we got into our seats (5th row!) and joined the home crowd in urging the "hoops" to victory.
This time, the home side rewarded the crowd with a 2-0 victory over the visitors from Ipswich Town (their nickname is the "tractor boys"--??!). The crowd was fired up after the second goal, and the video also shows their joy in taunting the opposing fans:



When the match ended, we hung around to take a few pictures before heading out of the stadium and toward the underground.
The trip back to Earls Court was short and simple, but a smaller contingent decided that, with only a few scant hours left in London, they would be remiss if they didn't try to find track 9 3/4 at the Kings Cross train station and fly away to Hogwarts. Some disembarked from the tube at this point, while a group of others pressed on towards Kings Cross (a :30 tube ride?), where after some poking around and asking the always-friendly Londoners for assistance, they found the portal they were looking for.


We were back to the hotel before midnight, and it was time to pack and get a few hours of sleep before Wednesday's 6:30AM wake-up call.