{"id":35,"date":"2006-10-24T21:38:52","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T20:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/?p=35"},"modified":"2008-10-16T21:35:51","modified_gmt":"2008-10-16T20:35:51","slug":"back-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/2006\/10\/back-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Back Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve just got back from a few days in London.<\/p>\n<p>Travelled on Friday evening and stayed near Euston overnight and then went onto to Ruislip on the Saturday morning for a final <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dwcon.org\/\">Discword Convention 2006<\/a> 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&#8217;s house.<\/p>\n<p>Caught up with friends on Sunday morning then back to Euston again. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Since we were in London anyway, we&#8217;d decided to take an extra day to show both the boys some of the sights. N had already &#8216;done&#8217; the whole historical monuments thing on a previous school trip and since K wasn&#8217;t like to be impressed by &#8220;Ooo&#8230;look! Buckingham Palace!&#8221;, 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.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, most of London seemed to like the idea too. It was packed!<\/p>\n<p>However, both boys did get to see a fair bit &#8211; 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 &#8220;really just like a big arcade&#8221;. They both enjoyed it though and we even managed to see a fair bit of the rest of the Museum &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t tell him where we were going.<\/p>\n<p>I say &#8216;fortunately&#8217; as we had:<\/p>\n<p>a) not taken into account just how exhausted we were after 4+ hours wandering around a museum<\/p>\n<p>and<\/p>\n<p>b) R&#8217;s mental map of where the shop was supposed to be turned out to be about 10 years out of date!<\/p>\n<p>After limping around for about another hour or so, we gave up, staggered back to the hotel and collapsed for an hour.<\/p>\n<p>Moral: before trying to visit a shop, make sure it&#8217;s still there first!<\/p>\n<p>Despite the fact that we hadn&#8217;t been terribly impressed with the hotel&#8217;s restaurant the previous evening, we were too tired to find somewhere else to eat, so opted to risk it again.<\/p>\n<p>Bad choice!<\/p>\n<p>What transpired deserves a whole entry of its own which I&#8217;ll try to post tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;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&#8217;s house. Caught up with friends on Sunday morning then back to Euston again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[70,69],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackwidows.co.uk\/iad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}