Sunday, October 28th - Volksmarch through London.
Bob: London boasts three Permanent Trails for Volksmarches, and we decided to try PT-94, the Royal London Trail, as a kind of walking tour of the city. The club sponsoring these walks, however, runs them quite differently than the Permanente Wanderwegs we had just walked in Germany. The instructions for the London walks were all posted on their website and could be downloaded and printed by potential walkers such as we. The trails are not in general loop trails; instead, they start at one Tube station and end at a different Tube station. If you are using the Tube to get around London, and I personally think that no sane person would ever want to drive around London, then having start and finish points at Tube stations is definitely an advantage. The London trails also feature a large number of control points where you write down something at a particular location along the route. PT-94, for example, had seven control points, which is rather more than a typical Year Round Event in the U.S. or a Permanente Wanderweg in Germany would have. The final difference is that the Permanent Trails give Volksmarching credit by mailing in a form that you download from the web site and on which you write down the checkpoints for the walk. Presumably the London club mails insert cards that have been stamped with the walk number, but that is less immediate gratification than the self-stamp process in the U.S. or the vendor-stamp process in Germany. Since the PT-94 instructions did not include a map, I sat down with a nice, detailed Insight "Flexi Map" of London (scale 1:15,000), which had all the streets and enough of the landmarks pictured on it that I could trace the route of our walk rather precisely. Doing this, I found that the route of PT-94 curled past the Serpentine where we had walked the previous night, so I decided that we would pick up the walk at that point and then complete everything starting at checkpoint #2. Grabbing our coats, cameras, and GPS we headed off to the Serpentine. Seeing Hyde Park by day was quite a bit more cheerful than at dusk. The trees were turning their fall colors and we had nice views out over the waters of the Serpentine as we crossed it heading over to the Queens Gate and the huge, fancy statue of Prince Albert, the consort for Queen Victoria. The statue of Albert is brilliantly gilded and the entire memorial struck me as a rather ostentatious and over done piece of work although it probably reflected the taste of Queen Victoria. |
Monika: The original plan for the day was to go to the British Museum. But...we had not walked for a few days and there are 4 Permanent Volksmarch Trails in London, and one of them started in Hyde Park so we could easily join it. Considering all that, the walk won over the Museum. We promised that we would come back to do the museum, but for today, we joined the walk where the road through the park makes a sweeping left hand curve. That was also the point of the first checkpoint, so everything was right with the world. This walk had, by the way, 7 checkpoints. The Brits must be worrying that people will just take the tube or bus to cut off a few miles. Walking the park in the daylight, albeit rather overcast, gave opportunity for a few nice pictures. The leaves seem to be at their peak, and it was rather pretty. There was some kind of race going on in Hyde Park, so car traffic was banned, which made this part extremely pleasant. When we first got a glimpse of the Albert monument, I did not believe my eyes. I had expected the normal man on horse, or man on pedestal. But this was golden man sitting under golden dome with lots of statues carved around it and above it, of course, Queen Victoria. I must say, she did nothing by halves. If she was going to build a memorial for her beloved consort, by golly, it was going to be noticed! |
Bob: From the Albert Memorial we zigzagged our way down to the Thames River, passing the huge and ornate Natural History Museum and the huge and ornate Harrods department store along the way. Both buildings were roughly a city block in size and intricately designed and decorated. Harrods attracted me not at all, but I did regret not having time and energy to do the Natural History Museum. I was really curious if it would have the chaotic jumble of the British Museum or be organized in some rational manner. Realistically, however, if I got into a museum that size I might not have come out until the next day and that would not do at all. |
Monika: After we finally left Hyde Park on the southwest corner, we started to walk through the beautiful section of Kensington, until we came to the Natural History Museum. This seems to be another beautiful, enormous, old museum. The outside alone was gorgeous. There was a line waiting to get in, so we decided, it may behoove us to come to London for a week just to do museums since next to the Natural History Museum was another rather large museum the Victoria and Albert Museum with, you guessed it, two friezes of the pair above the entrance. We now were walking along one of the main shopping areas and in front of us was Harrods. Now I knew it was a big department store, but it seems that in London everything needs to be bigger. The store seemed to cover at least a couple of blocks. It was hard to get a pictures, especially since every bus always seemed to stop in front. |
Bob: Once at the Thames we turned left onto the Chelsea Embankment and had a nice walk along the river for a kilometer or so. Although it was drizzling or lightly raining much of the time, we could clearly see beautiful bridges both upstream and downstream as well as a very pretty Peace Pagoda across the river from us. We saw tour boats, rowing sculls, and even a sailing regatta out on the Thames, so clearly the Thames adds some of the same liveliness and interest to London that the Elbe River and Alster Lakes do to Hamburg. |
Monika: Once almost back to Hyde Park, we turned to go south all the way to the Thames. The neighborhoods were still beautiful, with small parks with statues. We both stopped ever now and the to take pictures. It had started to rain, so I kept my picture taking to small chunks so that my lens would not get completely wet. We passed the old Royal Hospital, and I was reminded of some of the Ann Perry "Monk" series. At the Thames I would have loved to take more pictures, but the rain was still coming down and it was windy. But I did take some pictures. |
Bob: Turning back inland we walked past Victoria Station where we found a huge new shopping area both outside and mixed into the train station itself. We also spent a good half an hour there trying to figure out if we could take a train to Southampton to catch our ship. From Victoria Station we continued to Hyde Park Corner and took a gander at the Wellington Arch before heading over to Buckingham Palace on the Constitution Hill road. The guards were out at Buckingham Palace, but they didn't change while we were there so I didn't get any pictures of that. The statue of Queen Victoria on her throne was right out in front of the palace. Victoria was seated just below a gilded angel, and it strikes me as presumptuous, somehow, to forgo the question of the final judgment and put yourself on the side of the angels. We had picked a good day to do this walk because on Sunday the Constitution Hill road and the traffic circle in front of Buckingham Palace are closed to traffic so we could relax and wander around without worrying about being hit by a London taxicab, which almost happened on our last visit to London! |
Monika: . After a short time along the Thames, we started back towards Victoria Station. We found that there were bus and train connections to Southampton, so we will have to get to Victoria Station on Tuesday. Further up the road we walked towards the Wellington Arch and then along Constitution to Buckingham Palace. On Sundays there is no traffic on Constitution, around the Victoria Monument in front of Buckingham Palace, or on the Mall towards Trafalgar Square. Since I clearly remember, almost getting run over in the traffic around the Victoria Monument, I enjoyed the car free experience. |
Bob: From the Queen Victoria Memorial our route led northeast along "The Mall", which turned out to be another street that was fortunately closed to the public on Sundays. It was very pleasant to walk down the middle of the street, and we had very nice views both of the memorial and Buckingham Palace behind us and the Admiralty Arch in front of us. The Mall was lined with the Union Jack flag alternating with what I think is the green flag of Saudi Arabia. I could understand the Union Jack because we were, after all in Britain, but I was puzzled by the tremendous numbers of Saudi Arabian flags. Possibly it was a National "Suck Up to Oil Sheiks" day or the polite political equivalent of that, but I'm just guessing. At the Admiralty Arch The Mall reverted back to being a normal, traffic-clogged London street and we continued on the sidewalks to Trafalgar Square, where Admiral Nelson was still standing on top of his column. Something loud and raucous was going on in some big exposition tents behind Nelsons Column, but we were by this point too tired to spend the effort to investigate it. |
Monika: After taking the obligatory pictures of Buckingham Palace (no queen visible) and Victoria Monument, we headed down the Mall towards Trafalgar Square, enjoying walking in the middle of the road. But by the time we reached the Admiralty Arch the bliss ended, and the traffic was thicker and louder. We walked down the Strand enjoying the different theaters, shedding a tear at the Savoy - no G&S but Fiddler on the Roof, and found our last checkpoint. |
Bob: Following the Strand we finally worked our way to the stop point and took the Tube back to the starting point at the Marble Arch, which lies in one corner of Hyde Park. Taking Exit number 4 from the station (very confusing because of having at least 7 different exits), we came out at Speaker's Corner where we found guys up on soapboxes haranguing a small crowd of listeners. I would have liked to have stood around and gotten the drift of what they were so passionate about, but my feet were aching so we continued back past the first checkpoint at Victoria Gate to finish the walk. This was a great walk with many of the famous sites of London along its route. We enjoyed it very much, but with all the pictures we took and side explorations it took us at least 5 hours despite only being 10 kilometers. We continued on to the grocery store, bought provisions for our evening meal, and returned to our hotel room to put our feet up for the rest of the evening. Darkness fell very early, about 5 p.m., which was two hours earlier than in Hamburg due to the shift in time zones and the overnight shift from daylight savings time to Greenwich Standard Time, and that rather discouraged us from traipsing out after our light supper. |
Monika: After that we got back to a tube station. It seems that none of the walks are loops, but start at one tube station and stop at another and it is up to you to find your way back. We decided to get off at the station were the walk was supposed to have started and walk the first bit through Hyde Park. It was really bringing back all the old English stories, when we saw horses being ridden on the special horse paths. We went past an open grocery shop and stopped to shop for Abendessen. Lunch had been in a little cafe, were we had a plateful of Spaghetti with a nice sauce. But that was hours and many kilometers ago. So we started munching when we got back to our room. I then took a hot bath. All the places we had stayed at in Germany had nice efficient showers. But nothing helps tired, aching muscles like a hot bath, and here we had a long deep if narrow tub and plenty of hot water. Bliss! |
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