Friday, September 6, 2024 – Victoria and Albert Museum.

The British Museum is great but the Victoria and Albert Museum is every bit as good in its own way.

My favorite part of this museum was the Cast Courts.

This museum has great exhibits of original artwork and artifacts for the Middle Ages. The museum wanted to expand its collection and original art and artifacts were getting harder to find and it was getting harder to export these priceless treasures from their countries of origin. So, instead of obtaining the originals the Brits obtained plaster casts of the originals. Brilliant!

Trajan’s Column. The original is in Rome and commemorates Emperor Trajan’s military genius. The museum had to cut the plaster replica of this column in half to fit it into the space.

This is a full sized plaster replica of Michelangelo’s David.

Portico of Glory from the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela.

This is the front door of the Cathedral at the end of my pilgrimage walks. A number of years ago the Cathedral in Santiago enclosed the front door and did a lot of restoration work on the Portico of Glory. In order to see it now you need to book a special tour. During this tour you are allowed to spend five minutes viewing this amazing masterpiece in dim lighting and there are no pictures allowed. I really enjoyed spending some time examining the details of this exhibit.

After we were done at the museum it was time for a little shopping.

What an iconic department store. We browsed but didn’t buy anything.

Sara wanted to take some tea home so after Harrods we had a quick lunch and went tea shopping at Twinnings Tea. After our expedition to Twinnings Tea we went back to the apartment for a little siesta. And then a glass of champagne before strolling over to the restaurant for dinner.

First course was a trio of shellfish based appetizers.

Second course was shredded carrot on top of a scallop.

Third course was three beetroot preparations.

Eight course was a blueberry lemon tart.

Ninth course was fresh clotted cream and a panna cotta.

This was such a wonderful meal.

That’s it from London for this evening. Tomorrow Sara is traveling back to Houston and I take the train to Paris.

I hope you are having a wonderful day wherever you are.

Thursday, September 5, 2024 – Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.

This morning we walked in the rain to Westminster Abbey.

The tomb of the unknown soldier from World War One always moves me.

Beautiful stained glass windows in Westminster Abbey.

The altar. The floor is over 1000 years old.

After we finished touring the Abbey it was time for lunch.

I started out with a half pint of Guinness.

Boiled cabbage and duck confit with an egg on top. I have no idea what confit means.

After lunch we ambled over to Buckingham Palace.

We spent the first hour going through this very interesting exhibit of photographic portraits of the royal family, past and present.

Then we toured the Royal Mews. What in the world is a mews? Do they speak English in England???

Apparently a mews is a place where they keep the horses and carriages and the limos. Who knew?

This is where they keep the very pampered royal horses. The late Queen loved her horses.

This is the coronation carriage. It is completely covered with gold leaf.

After we finished our tour of the mews we toured selected rooms in the Palace. It was beautiful but they wouldn’t allow pictures and there were plenty of people walking around enforcing this prohibition.

After we finished at Buckingham Palace we bussed back to the apartment and put our feet up for a few minutes. After a brief siesta we hustled down to Evelyn’s Table for a Michelin stared tasting menu dinner.

Two seatings at this restaurant and 12 people at each seating.

First course. Smoked eel and steak tartare.

Fourth course. Cornish pollock with a leek and mussel reduction.

Fifth course. A variety of cuts of pork that were out of this world delicious!

Sixth course. A cake and ice cream dessert.

Seventh course. A trio of desserts. Starting at 6:00 o’clock, a delicious almond cookie with a dollop of ice cream. At 11:00 o’clock a peach granita. At 1:00 a mulled raspberry delight over a sponge cake.

What a wonderful meal!

That’s it for tonight. I hope you are having a good day wherever you are.

Wednesday, September 4, 2024 – Day trip to Greenwich.

Did you know that Uber has a fleet of water taxis that motor up and down the Thames. Sara and I walked down to the Embankment and caught this Uber water taxi to Greenwich.

After we disembarked from the water taxi our first stop was the Cutty Sark. If you have ever purchased a bottle of Cutty Sark whiskey you have probably noticed a drawing of this ship on the label. The Cutty Sark was a clipper ship build for the tea trade between China and London.

The Cutty Sark was built to be fast but also large enough to carry a substantial cargo. It set records for the fastest voyage by a sailing ship between between China and London. After a few years steam ships started to take over the China trade and the Cutty Sark began a new career in the wool trade between Australia and London

The crew was away from home for the six months it took to sail from London to China, purchase a load of tea, load it and sail back to London. They endured dangerous working conditions, disgusting food and cramped living quarters for next to nothing in pay at the end of the voyage. When the Cutty Sark was in the wool trade most of the crew deserted when the ship got to Australia to avoid the voyage back to London.

In the 1950s the Cutty Sark was severely damaged by a storm off the coast of Portugal. A wealthy sea captain purchased her, moved her to Greenwich and restored her to her former glory. She is now a museum.

After we finished our tour of the Cutty Sark we walked around the Royal Naval College. On the grounds of the Royal Naval College there was another Christopher Wren church.

After our tour of the Royal Naval College we had lunch. Greenwich is a college town and every college town is chock a block with pizza joints. We found a pizza joint with a wood fired pizza oven and ordered a couple of pizzas

I got the meat special and added kalamata olives. It was very good.

After lunch we walked up to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

The Royal Observatory is famous for two discoveries. The first discovery was the prime meridian. The equator is basically a line that runs around the middle of the earth, dividing the earth into two halves, north and south. The prime meridian is a line circumnavigating the earth from the North Pole to the South Pole that divides the earth into two halves, east and west. The prime meridian runs through the grounds of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Latitude is established by reference to the Equator and longitude is established by reference to the Prime Meridian.

In order to establish longitude when you are on a long sea voyage you need an accurate clock. John Harrison spent almost forty years, from the mid 1720s to 1761, trying to build a precisely accurate clock that could withstand the rigors of a long sea voyage. The clock he finally built in 1761 was rugged and very accurate and allowed mariners to chart their positions accurately.

After we finished touring the Royal Observatory we took the Uber boat back to London.

On the way back to the apartment we walked through the Victorian Embankment Garden. The flowers were beautiful.

For dinner tonight we went to a fish place.

We started with oysters on the half shell.

I had monkfish on a bed of mashed potatoes with a lobster sauce. Yum!

For dessert I had a passion fruit cheese cake.

After dinner we took in another show.

It was a very different show and a different crowd when compared to the show and the crowd at Phantom. But we both really enjoyed this show.

That’s it for today. I hope you are having a great day wherever you are.

Tuesday, September 3, 2024 – St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London

The first stop on our tour today was St. Paul’s Cathedral.

At the entrance to this church is a marble baptismal font the size of a backyard swimming pool and a number of monuments to famous Britons.

This is a monument to the Duke of Wellington. He is riding his favorite horse Copenhagen.

Christopher Wren was the architect of this cathedral and built it in the baroque style of the grand Italian Catholic churches. When Wren finished his masterpiece the Church of England clergy thought that the ornate baroque style of St. Paul’s was not the best fit for future Church of England churches. Thereafter, Church of England churches would be austere and angular. I happen to like ornate and baroque as opposed to austere and angular.

View from the altar looking through the choir stalls.

This is a memorial to the American servicemen and servicewomen who died during World War Two.

Hundreds of famous Britons are buried in the basement of St. Paul’s.

After we finished our tour of St. Paul’s we walked over to the Sky Garden.

The Sky Garden is a rooftop observation deck on the top of one of the skyscrapers in London’s central business district.

This building is called the Shard, as in shard of glass. It is located across the Thames from the Sky Garden. King Charles hates this new architectural style.

After we exited the Sky Garden we had a quick lunch and then toured the Tower of London. We started with a tour led by one of the Beefeaters.

This tour lasted about an hour and our tour guide did a great job giving us the highlights of the history of the Tower of London.

Did you know the kings and queens had a royal menagerie in the Tower of London complex that included animals from every corner of their far flung empire?

For dinner we went to a Michelin stared West African restaurant called Akoko.

Sixth course was a slice of beef tenderloin.

After that we had three dessert courses.

What a delicious and memorable meal!

That’s it for today. I hope you are having a wonderful day wherever you are.

Monday, September 2, 2024 – The British Museum and Phantom of the Opera

Happy Labor Day for everyone celebrating Labor Day. For everyone who is not celebrating Labor Day, happy Monday.

Today we visited the British Museum.

The British Museum is flat out amazing. While the British Empire controlled a good portion of the world, the British gathered priceless artifacts from all over the world and brought these artifacts back to London and put them in the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles are the highlights of the Museum, but the Museum has so much more to offer.

One of my favorite exhibits was the Sutton Hoo exhibit.

There is a whole wing of the Museum dedicated to objects found at Sutton Hoo and other excavated mounds in England.

This is a little hard to read but I recommend you watch a movie about Sutton Hoo and the excavation, called The Dig.

I also enjoyed the Japanese exhibit sponsored by Mitsubishi.

This set of Samurai armor and armaments was amazing.

This ceramic pillow was in the Chinese wing. I have no idea how this could have been comfortable or popular.

The Museum has an extensive collection of timepieces from wristwatches to these huge grandfather clocks. This summer my good friend Jim Priefert visited a great clock museum in Iowa. Jim is recovering from a major surgery. If you have a prayer to spare please send it his way.

After we finished our tour of the museum we stopped off at a tapas place for a light lunch.

Potatoes Bravas and grilled squid. Very tasty.

After an short afternoon siesta we had dinner at this great Indian restaurant.

They don’t take reservations so we waited in line outside the restaurant for fifteen minutes before we got a table. It was worth the wait.

After this great meal we walked over to His Majesty’s Theatre.

We got sixth row center tickets to see Phantom of the Opera.

Who doesn’t like Phantom. And this production was beyond magnificent.

That’s it for tonight. I hope you are having a great day wherever you are.

Sunday, September 1, 2024 – Walking Tour of London

This morning we did a Sandemans Walking Tour of London. It was great and in large part it was great because our tour guide was so great. Herbie was a professional street entertainer from the age of sixteen until he was forty-five, about ten years ago, when his knees gave out on him. He was a tightrope walker and a juggler and a magician. Herbie traveled all over the world performing at busker festivals like the one that was held in Denver in the late 1980s.

Sara and I walked a few blocks over to Covent Garden for breakfast. We found a great pastry shop and had a croissant before we started the walking tour.

Covent Garden is one of the few places in London where they still allow street performers. I think we will go back to Covent Garden after dinner and watch the street performers.

After Herbie introduced himself we started our walking tour and the first stop was this typical English pub.

Notice all the flowers. I think some of these flowers are real and some are plastic.

According to Herbie the typical English pub is starting to fade away as people drink less and tend to do their drinking at home. Pub culture dictates that when you have a baby you bring the baby down to the pub for a sort of second baptism called wetting the baby’s head. You don’t baptize the baby with beer, but you pass the baby around so everyone can admire the little tyke and drink to the baby’s good health.

We walked down a pedestrian only street that was lined with book shops specializing in magic and the occult. A lot of tour guides tell their clients that this street was the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books. One of the shop owners got fed up with this falsehood and posted this sign outside his shop.

This is the Horse Guards Parade and the London Eye in the background.

This is Herbie performing a magic trick for us.

Herbie made the little red balls magically disappear.

After we finished the walking tour Sara and I had lunch at an old English pub.

I had a chicken and bacon and leek pie with mashed potatoes and a pint of ale. It was a real stick to your ribs lunch.

After lunch we took a long walk along the Thames Embankment and then went back to the apartment where I took a nap.

For dinner we went to an Italian restaurant.

I had Bucatini alla Carbonara. It was so good.

That’s it for today. I hope you are having a great day wherever you are.

Travel Day to London – August 30-31, 2024

I got to the airport in Denver 3 hours before my plane’s scheduled departure.

A couple of days ago I read an article in the Denver Post warning travelers to get to the airport extra early because it was going to be a record breaking Labor Day weekend for travel at DIA. That turned out to be a false warning. I sat on the concourse by myself for two hours before people started to show up for the flight to London. Better early than late.

I paid a little extra for a bulkhead aisle seat. When I got on the plane I saw that the middle seat was occupied by a young mother and her six month old son, Oliver. I had a sudden horrifying vision of a nine hour flight sitting next to a screaming baby.

After we took off and got up to our cruising altitude mom fed Oliver and he fell asleep in a bassinet that the flight attendant attached to the bulkhead.

I have never seen this setup for a baby on a plane.

Oliver slept through almost the entire flight. What a rockstar baby.

My flight landed on time and clearing passport control and customs was a breeze. Sara and I took an Uber to Covent Garden and checked into our cozy two bedroom fifth floor apartment.

That is our apartment on the top floor and there is no elevator.

The apartment has a nice living room and kitchen and two small bedrooms.

After we got settled in we went out for lunch and a stroll around Hyde Park.

Memorial to the 55,000 British bomber crewmen who died during World War Two.

After a brief rest at the apartment we went out for dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant in Bloomsbury.

And for dessert a honey and date cheesecake.

That’s it from London. I hope you are having a wonderful day wherever you are.

Saturday, June 15, 2024 – Travel Day from Porto to Denver.

I was awake and out the door of the Best Guest Hostel at 5:30 AM. I finally landed at Denver at 6:30 PM. I am so tired.

A sign at the Denver airport. Yes I would like a beer.

Thank you all for following the blog. I hope you enjoyed following it as much as I enjoyed creating it. It was a great trip but I am very glad to be home. Jan got takeout from our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant for dinner. That was so thoughtful.

Until next trip. Please stay safe and be happy.

Mark

Friday, June 14, 2024 – Day trip to Aveiro.

Rick Steves calls Aveiro the Venice of Portugal. That calls for a day trip to see if he is right or just blowing smoke. Just a little fun fact, for years Rick Steves has been smoking weed every day and is a big advocate for legalizing cannabis nationwide.

I got up early this morning and caught the train from Porto to Aveiro. When I left Porto it was chilly and cloudy and rainy. I was hoping for better weather in Aveiro.

I got to Aveiro at about 9:30 and spent about an hour walking around town.

Aveiro is also known for these blue tiles.

It was starting to cloud up so I decided to do a gondola ride before it started raining.

These boats are called moliceiros in Aveiro. The big thing in Aveiro is to do a moliceiro tour through the canals. That explains Rick Steves saying that Aveiro is the Venice of Portugal.

An old ceramics factory that they repurposed for office space.

A number of the bridges over the canals are wrapped in ribbon.

Homer Simpson and Maggie. What are they doing in Aveiro?

The canal tour was fun, but I firmly believe that Rick Steves is blowing smoke, literally, when he describes Aveiro as the Venice of Portugal.

This is a memorial to the men of Aveiro who lost their lives in World War One. Their names are inscribed on this memorial. Apparently Aveiro lost eight men in World War One. Aveiro is not a small town. When Sara and I visited Beaune, France, which is a small town, they had a memorial for the men of Beaune who did not return from World War One.

Almost every male villager in Beaune between the ages of 17 and 30 fought in World War One and most of them did not return. I am not denigrating Aveiro’s losses as a result of the First World War. But Aveiro’s losses pale in comparison to the losses suffered by the citizens of Beaune and every other city, town and village in France.

You see this all over Spain and Portugal. The Spanish and Portuguese people generally refuse to drink the tap water. They claim that if they drink the tap water they will get deathly ill. This is crazy. I have been drinking the tap water since I got here and I have had no GI issues. Can you even imagine the plastic waste these people are generating when they exclusively drink bottled water.

Lunch. Fried John Dory with sea rice, which is rice in a broth with shrimp and mussels, and a nice glass of green wine.

After lunch I took the train back to Porto. This evening I am going to get my big suitcase out of storage and pack for the flight home tomorrow. If all goes well I will land in Denver around 6:00 PM tomorrow, Saturday, June 15. I am looking forward to coming home.

For my last meal in Porto I had a suckling pig sandwich.

That’s it from Porto, Portugal. I hope you are having a great day wherever you are.

Thursday, June 13, 2024 – Travel from Lisbon to Porto.

About a week ago I purchased a train ticket from Lisbon to Porto departing at noon today from the Oriente Station. Yesterday I figured out that the Oriente Station is 8 kilometers from my hotel.

There is a Saint Apolonia train station two blocks from my hotel but that is a metro only station. There is a Saint Apolonia train station about 4 kilometers north of my hotel and that is where my train originates. I should have booked my train ticket so that I got on the train at the Saint Apolonia long distance train station. But I didn’t. Oh well, I figured I could either taxi or walk the 8 kilometers to the Oriente Station depending on how I felt in the morning.

I got up this morning and packed and checked out of my hotel by 8:30. It was a beautiful morning and if I started walking at 8:30 I would be there by 11:00. I decided to walk. I figured I needed the exercise.

As I was walking out of the historic district I noticed a museum that is now on my list of things to visit the next time I am in Lisbon.

There is a reason this bridge looks a lot like the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lisbon was devasted by an earthquake in 1755. It was somewhere in the range of 9.0 on the Richter Scale making it one of the most severe earthquakes in recorded history.

When the earthquake hit Lisbon, most of the buildings collapsed. It occurred on a Catholic holiday so the churches were filled with lit candles. The candles set fire to the rubble. In order to escape the fires the people who were not trapped in the rubble ran down to the River Targus, which is a tidal river. When they got to the river they were astonished to see that there was no water in the river. They thought this was some sort of sign from God, like Moses parting the Red Sea. So they all ran out onto the exposed riverbed.

What they didn’t know was that the earthquake originated on a fault line out in the ocean west of Lisbon. This created a tsunami. The tsunami sucked the water out of the Targus River and then threw it back in a massive wave that drowned everyone sheltering in the riverbed. As a result of this tragedy Lisbon was rebuilt to be as earthquake proof as possible.

When Lisbon wanted to build a bridge across the Targus River they wanted it to be able to withstand a severe earthquake. They heard that San Francisco was building just such a bridge. They hired Joseph Strauss, the engineer who designed the Golden Gate Bridge, to design them a smaller version of this iconic bridge.

The Lisbon bridge has two decks. The top deck is for cars and trucks and the bottom deck is for trains. At one time bicycles and pedestrians were allowed to use the upper deck. However, there were so many jumpers that they said no more pedestrians or bicyclists on the bridge.

I spent the first half of my morning perambulation walking along a riverside path beside the cruise ship berths. Lisbon is a popular destination for cruise ships and there were 5 cruise ships berthed in Lisbon this morning.

The second half of my walk took me through an old warehouse district that was being redeveloped into funky lofts.

This guy had a long narrow shop where he sold, or was trying to sell, Oriental furniture and knick knacks.

It looks like I am walking to the train station along the Camino.

After a brief stop for a chocolate croissant and an orange juice I finally made it to Oriente Station at 11:00.

This train station is very modern and the Portuguese are very proud of the design.

This is my train arriving at the station right on time.

The train to Porto was a little slow and we arrived 30 minutes behind schedule. I then took a Metro train to the City Center station and checked in to my hostel. When I walked in the door the hospitalero greeted me by name and asked me if I enjoyed my trip to Copenhagen and Lisbon. What a great memory. He saved me a lower bunk on the first floor in his best bunk room. He also booked me an Uber to the airport for Saturday morning. What a great guy.

This is Andrea the hospitalero at my hostel.

After checking in to the alburgue I realized I was thirsty so I walked down to the bar where last Thursday the owner of the bar introduced me to white port and tonic. The minute I sat down at a patio table the owner came over and asked me if I enjoyed my trip to Copenhagen and asked me if I wanted my usual. I told him that his bar is the only bar in Porto where I will drink port and tonic.

This is my buddy Mario, the owner of the bar.

That’s it from Porto. I hope you are having a great day wherever you are.