Running in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park
The most wonderful surprise for Bob and me was the quality of the running in London. Truly magnificent! Kensington Gardens was a block and a half away from the flat we rented, and it is glorious. We were running along, talking about how it reminded us of Central Park, when we realized we were in the back yard of the Royal residences, separated by just a polo field. We speculated about which “cottage” (really, mansions) belonged to Wills and Kate, and which housed Harry and Meghan. Next thing you knew we were at Kensington Palace! Its gardens were beautful and it is actually open to visitors, though we never got there to see the Princess Diana Fashion Exhibit.
We discovered Round Pond on one run, the Serpentine on another, the Princess Diana Memorial on another, and green parakeets that let people feed them out of their hands on another. The morning dew made the park glow eerily.
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| Kensington Palace |
And right beside Kensington Gardens was Hyde Park, not quite as Frederick Olmstead-like, but still large and lovely, with a huge grassy green in the center which doubtless hosts loads of picnickers and probably outdoor concerts in the summertime.
We agreed we would probably get in fantastic running shape if we lived in London, as Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park are only one example of London’s abundance of green spaces.
Other Highlights
Other highlights of our days in London included:
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| 38,000-pound silverplate set at Harrods |
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| Metal art at the V&A |
- We visited the Church of St. Martin in the Fields, near Leicester Square, where we attended a Mozart concert in the evening in tribute to my parents, who when they lived outside of London in the late 1980s used to attend classical concerts there.
- We discovered the London Film Festival was going on and went to see the hysterically funny documentary “I Used to be Normal: A Boy Band Fangirl Story,” in a far-flung London neighborhood (ethnic, not touristy, sort of Queens-like) after an unusual and unexpectedly delicious meal at a Turkish restaurant.
- We visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, aka the V&A, which focuses on design and saw a new history of photography exhibition that had been dedicated by Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (just Kate to us commoners), just a few days before. I loved the museum’s display of metal art, and we mostly passed on the paintings of dead people.
- We spent a couple of hours in the world-famous, over-the-top luxurious Harrods’s Department store, where we perused 2000-pound ($2,600 US) coffeemakers, 38,000-pound ($50,000) silver-plate cutlery sets, 3050-pound ($4000) purses, swords, wine glasses (some only 45 pounds each – $$60) and so much more, each item more decadent, expensive and unnecessary than the next. We bought nothing but bought picnic food in the surprisingly reasonable little deli in the chocolate section and picnicked out in a courtyard by the Tube station.
- On our last day, we visited the Tower of London, enjoying a tour by a very British Yeoman something-or-other, taking in the Crown Jewels, watching a video of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 (poor girl looked terrified, in my opinion), and seeing the extreme excess and ostentatiousness of the soup tureens and salt containers for royal banquets hundreds of years past. We learned about the checkered and grisly past of the royal family, especially Henry IIX, and wondered if Meghan knows what she got herself into.
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| Our guide |
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| A beheading about to happen at the Tower of London |
And now … goodbye London, off to Italy!
