After avoiding saturated fat for months I expected that I would need to relax my diet during this trip, but I was not prepared for the “English Breakfast Bap”, which is apparently a fried egg, two massive sausages, and three strips of bacon on a Brioche bun. It was tasty, and so far I haven’t had a heart attack, but we’ll see how tomorrow goes.
Following the cholesterol-with-a-side-of-grease for breakfast I walked the two miles to the British Museum, a place with so many impressive artifacts that it could easily be split into a dozen separate museums. Luckily I had read a suggestion to book an off-hours tour, so I entered with a group of about twelve other people an hour before opening and we had the Egyptian galleries to ourselves before the mobs descended. From there much time was spent battling through tour groups in the midst of archaeological treasures, but entering a room to discover the impressive statues that once adorned the Parthenon, or seeing the remnants of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, made it much easier to ignore the hordes shoving their way past.
After five hours at the museum fatigue was setting in, so I rambled home through St. James’s Park (no pigeon friends this time), past the guards in the fuzzy hats at Buckingham Palace, then rested for a bit before taking off for our next adventure. Audrey’s friend Brian Kehew is apparently in London at the same time as us, and while Abbey Road studios isn’t open for tours, they do open for lectures two weekends every year and have called in Brian and his friend Kevin to give those lectures since they wrote the definitive book on the Beatles’ time at Abbey Road. So yet again following our “never say no when Brian calls, because it will be awesome” rule, we met at Abbey Road at 5pm and were ushered through the locked gates with about 100 other Beatles fans to hear Brian and Kevin give a 90 minute lecture on the history of the studios from Studio 2, which is the studio in which the Beatles recorded almost all of their music. I hadn’t planned on visiting Abbey Road, but sitting in the room where so many great songs were born, and hearing the inside scoop on how it happened from a friend of ours, will be a very cool memory.