10-29

Day 6

You know, I'm not often sick.  Oh, maybe three days a year I'm feeling bad enough to call it a sick day.  But I've been sick for several days in a row this year: first back in April when the Star Wars Celebration was happening, and now in October when I'm on my Europe trip.  There was a time when I would've laid the blame at the feet of a vengeful God.  But now I'm wondering if it isn't some kind of self-inflicted psychological thing.  Wouldn't be the first time.

I'm muddling through, though (a couple of days later, I found out Jeff was sick too, with the exact same symptoms).

Today's major activity was a cycling tour through London.  I don't know what it cost (Emily booked it), but we each got one of those bikes with an electric motor in it, and I'd never been on one before (I've also never ridden a polar bear either, if you're boasting about all the stuff you've done).  Our tourguide was a dude from Marikesh (I forget what his name was--but Emily had it written down, and since she's right next to me, she even spelled it for me: Younes), and I liked him because he spoke with the exact same accent as Nandor the Relentless on "What We Do In The Shadows."  

There was a group of about ten of us, all with bikes, and we were not only supposed to follow Unus the Untouchable, but were supposed to do it single file.  None of us knew the area, how to navigate the insane bike lanes (it was like a video game out there--one of those cruel video games you give up on after dying three seconds in), or knew where we were going.  But amazingly, only one person got lost on the whole tour.

If you have ever known me IRL (that's In Real Life, if you don't speak Klingon), it's a pretty good bet you can predict which one of us it was.  I once got lost in my little town of nine hundred people . . . and I was in a car.

So, there was a family that was riding together, and they were right ahead of me, and for some reason, the dad decided to run a red light to stay with the group (Unus had told us not to, and that the rest of us would wait for them), and his wife and kid thought, "Okay, we'll run it too."  But me, I thought, I've seen how people are driving--ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE BLEEDING ROAD, FOR PUCK'S SAKE!!!--and how short the light cycles are here, so I'll wait.  But nobody else did.  

When the light finally changed, I rode hard forward, but could no longer see any of my bicycling group.  I guess they turned left to turn right . . . and if that makes sense to you, you must live in the UK.  So I rode around looking for people on e-bikes, and eventually, Unus the Untouchable found me* and led me back to the other nine, who were taking pictures of the British government buildings.

Because the tour moved so fast (and I was always lagging behind), I didn't get to even LOOK at the front of this statue of Winston Churchill . . . but it turns out that Emily did.

We went all around town, and saw many things, wherein Unus would briefly tell us about them (like Gabriel's wharf, the Globe theater, the London Eye, the Thames, Parliament, a shoppe that stocked Dr. Pepper, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the spot where King Arthur beheaded Morgana), and I thought it could've been three hours instead of just two.

We've had lots of rides on the train these past few days.

Jeff and Emily

One of the day's activities was to go to the cane store to get Jeff a walking stick (and an umbrella), so we went to James Smith & Sons, a London cane shop that has existed for two hundred years.  There were swarthy young employees inside the shop, but the man who helped us was an older, distinguished gentleman with an accent so cultured and classy that my IQ went up sixteen points just talking to him.

This appears to be the only photo I took inside the cane shop.  I was sure I'd taken a better one, but it's not on my phone.

Jeff ended up getting a walking stick (out of the wood and topper of his preference), cut to his arm length, and an umbrella that was also tailor-made for him.  He considered getting a cane that doubled as a chair, but it was deeply uncomfortable (we've all sat on things we shouldn't have over the years, and this experience was nearly as shameful).  It boggles my mind that a store could exist that only sells the one thing, but it also makes me feel hopeful about the human race that such things exist, at least somewhere.

Jeff really wanted to see HALLOWEEN ENDS, and we went to two theaters to find one that had it.  I had heard only bad things, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Having seen all the installments (except for the second HALLOWEEN 2), I'm glad I saw it, and the movie did some unique things, with varying levels of success.  

I had brought my laptop with me, and it made my bag so heavy that only a bodybuilder wouldn't complain about it.  I think it's clear I'll have to start saving up for a new one soon (it's partly my own darn fault because I asked Dell to get me a laptop with a DVD drive in it, and they said, "What the eff?  Why would you want that?" and I told them so I could take it to the cabin and watch videos on it, and they said they'd see what they could do.  But sadly, the DVD ROM stopped working early in the year, so it's just dead weight now . . . and a lot of it).  At the rate I've been making money, I should have enough in about 2041.  

Over the last few days, I feel I have seen every inch of the London Underground (while of course that's not true, I've seen the old bits that date from the end of the nineteenth century, to the new stuff they built in the twenty-first), but it's been interesting to see how many people they can stuff in there at a time (Saturday night was the worst, when there were so many people trying to get on the trains that they made announcements redirecting the lines to the doors that are marked No Entrance.  We were absolutely jammed in there, with no room to maneuver, all the seats taken, and every one of the hand grips for standing passengers taken also.  I checked just now, and the daily average number of riders on all the lines is 1.8 million.

*This name I keep calling him is not (necessarily) a racial slur.  It's just that there was an X-men villain called that, and it's pronounced the same way.  I don't remember things that happened on this trip, even though it was mere hours before, but I can remember an ultra-obscure Marvel Comics character (he had a red suit) that will never, ever come up again.