Back Again
We’ve just got back from a few days in London.
Travelled on Friday evening and stayed near Euston overnight and then went onto to Ruislip on the Saturday morning for a final Discword Convention 2006 Committee meeting that took most of Saturday afternoon. R, K and I spent the night at a local bed and breakfast whilst N stayed at a friend’s house.
Caught up with friends on Sunday morning then back to Euston again.
Since we were in London anyway, we’d decided to take an extra day to show both the boys some of the sights. N had already ‘done’ the whole historical monuments thing on a previous school trip and since K wasn’t like to be impressed by “Ooo…look! Buckingham Palace!”, we decided to head to the Science Museum. This decision was firmly backed by both boys once they realised that the Museum was doing a special exhibition on arcade/video games featuring everything from early Pac-Man to Virtual Reality.
Unfortunately, most of London seemed to like the idea too. It was packed!
However, both boys did get to see a fair bit – although K was disappointed that there was only 1 Sonic game. N felt that the exhibition should have focused a little more on the history and background to video games rather than just being, in his words “really just like a big arcade”. They both enjoyed it though and we even managed to see a fair bit of the rest of the Museum – though I suspect we only saw half of it. K seemed most impressed by the washing machine that he could operate himself and the hand-driven generator that he could use to try and light a table lamp or operate a radio.
Having spent about 4 hours or more in the Museum, we decided to see if we could find Forbidden Planet on the way back by taking a roundabout tube trip and a bit of walking. We figured N might like to look around the shop although, fortunately, we didn’t tell him where we were going.
I say ‘fortunately’ as we had:
a) not taken into account just how exhausted we were after 4+ hours wandering around a museum
and
b) R’s mental map of where the shop was supposed to be turned out to be about 10 years out of date!
After limping around for about another hour or so, we gave up, staggered back to the hotel and collapsed for an hour.
Moral: before trying to visit a shop, make sure it’s still there first!
Despite the fact that we hadn’t been terribly impressed with the hotel’s restaurant the previous evening, we were too tired to find somewhere else to eat, so opted to risk it again.
Bad choice!
What transpired deserves a whole entry of its own which I’ll try to post tomorrow.
