We came, we saw…

…we took over the Tower.

Crazy, busy, ash-y town, that was London when we were there last week. The infamous London Fog was in full spate, made worse by the drift of ash-belch from Iceland. It was really cold! We’d left our gloves and wraps at home, for some bizarre reason, and while we didn’t need them (except on the top of a double-decker tour bus) it was fairly nippy when it got windy.

The city was surprisingly clean for being so large and crazybusy, but it must be strange to grow up alongside all of that iconic history — and ignore it, for the most part. T. wanted to be completely unimpressed with it, but she was taken by the huge lions in Trafalgar Square, and the fact that the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Field is …not in a field. Disappointing, that.

It was a madhouse getting out of there, and we’re still sort of halfway recovering from being shoved on a very hot train and having to stand for a good part of the train journey between London and Glasgow, packed cheek by jowl with our fellow man. We were grateful for each stop, as ten or twenty people left, and our congestion was eventually eased — but we were grateful to be allowed ON the train, and that, except for some burning eyes and a slight orangey smudge over the Clyde, Glasgow seems to have dodged the worst of the ash-cloud from Iceland.

After hearing wild tales of people spending thousands taking ferries, trains and automobiles across vast tracts of land in an effort to leave the island, the UK looks to be opening up the skies for air travel again tomorrow, unless conditions change radically overnight. This has been a real hardship for a lot of people — and it’s made us do some thinking about our own travel plans and consider always preparing for Plan B…. just in case.

We came, we saw, we didn’t get to see as much as we wanted to! Oh, well. Maybe next time.