A Few Final Must Sees

For the third day straight, it was hot and sunny in London - BONUS! We did the walking tour - CHECK! We did the Hop On Hop Off Bus - CHECK! Today, we set out to see a few more highlights, for us anyway, this time using the Underground Tube - CHECK! The trains roll fast and often here. Sometimes they are separate cars and sometimes they are just one long expanse of train. Getting to them, however, often requires travelling on steep, long escalators.

We bought the full day unlimited use pass for under $20 a person at Paddington and our first destination via the St. Johns Wood Tube Station was.......

I hope you guessed Abbey Road - not sure which of the Beatles are shown here. The white building in the background is Abbey Road Studio, still one of the hottest recording destinations in the world. Needless to say, there is an Abbey Road Studio Gift Shop next door with some really cool stuff and memorabilia, like Paul's left handed Hofner guitar.

The studio is protected by a "white" wall, which has so much graffiti written on it that it has to be repainted every four weeks. The gift shop sells graffiti pencils, so clearly this is not discouraged. The Get Back in this photo, of course, refers to the Beatles classic hit.

Back at the shop, there is an interesting timeline of the studio's achievements since 1935 and a photo op inside.

Back on the Tube, we headed for Soho and in particular the iconic Carnaby St, famous in the 60's. It's not as bohemian as is was back then, but some of the shops still have that air - like the one selling the inspiration for Kinky Boots.

We chose to lunch here and although there were some cool pubs in the area, we opted for Whyte and Brown, specializing in their free range chicken.

For lunch, Dawn had a caesar, I had chicken with the biggest yorkshire I've ever seen and we shared truffle parmesan fries. YUM!

There's a lot to look at in this area, like Liberty of London, a fabulous tudor style building housing some pretty high end merchandise. The scarf Dawn looked at was 195 Br. pounds (over $300). There were also some well placed phone booths.

Back underground, we next headed to the Embankment Station. Each time we've travelled on the Tube, we've had to change to another line to make it to our destination. This is not hard to figure out. London HAS more than a few lines. We were heading to the Temple Church, with its tributes to the Knights Templar, but alas, Michelin neglected to inform us that over the summer anyway, the church is closed on the weekends - some church. We could only get a glimpse of the side of the church.

On the way, however, we did get a nice view of the Royal Palace of Justice on the Strand and we visited the Twinings tea shop, with some products only found there.

There may also have been another of those City of London dragons along the way.

At this point, even with the Tube, our feet were saying, "Enough Already!" So we headed back to hotel for a respite. They are celebrating Carnival - don't ask me what this is about - here this weekend and there were more hot chicks with glitter on their cheeks and skimpy outfits than I have ever seen. But we of the earlier generation will avoid that silliness. SOB! So, finally we got to a pub for dinner, one all of 200 metres from our hotel. This was the Victoria, one of the Fuller pubs across London. Rumour has it that the likes of Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin ate here - maybe Dickens too. Anyway, we had, for Dawn the pork and chorizo burger and I had pan seared calf's liver. Dessert was an amazing sticky toffee pudding.

London has many icons, including the Hackney carriage, black cab and the red double decker bus. Since this is my last post from England, I thought there was no fitting way to end this segment than with these.