Just getting warmed up

I have to be in the right mood for a visit to London. If you feel up for it, its a fantastic city to visit, explore and generally lose yourself in. But if you're not, it feels like the most soulless, lonely, and miserable city on the planet! So as you can imagine, turning up over 1 1/2 hours late, thanks to the M4, at Victoria coach station, knowing I'd already missed my train up to Leicester (from St Pancras... basically from the southern to northern end of central London) meant i was in a tremendous mood for the thrills and spills of the English Capital!

Little aside bit here: those of you who know the rough geography of the UK (and some of you did a geography degree with me... so own up!), will be aware that the most direct route from Cardiff to Leicester does not involve going through London (someone decided to build Birmingham in the middle of that way!). But those of you also familiar with the public transport system of the UK will also be aware, that trying to get anywhere on some weekends is nigh on impossible without pitching camp on a tesco forecourt and begging for scraps to feed you on the long lonely crawl home. And so thus it was that I came to be going from Cardiff, down the M4 to London, and then up the Midland Mainline (thankfully NOT the M1 - do i look like i enjoy torture on Britains motorways?!?!) to the fine East Midlands city of Leicester.

Fortunately, Friday evening the whole ordeal of getting from Victoria to St Pancras only took 30 mins, (when youve spent 4 hours on a bus to get there in the first place... 30 mins is a joy) and so I was left to the delightful people on Midland Mainline, who having heard my tale of woe that resulted in missing my original train, preceeded to take pity on me and give me a lovely trip up to Leicester to finally meet up with Rich and Karen for the weekend.

Having not seen them since their wedding in the summer (for which I was very honoured to be Rik's best man, and yes, there will be an update with photos etc....... eventually. I'm looking at sometime around 2012 at my current update rate!) it was long overdue...... and also Rik had my Quake 3 cd!
So two days of chatting, chilling out, watching South Park, eating take aways (its was Rik's turn to cook Saturday night), playing on the Xbox and with Ozzy, and generally catching-up passed away far too quickly. As these times always do!

So Sunday lunctime back on the train to London which not only got there on-time, but half an hour early, in the middle of a gorgeous, warm, sunny autumn day. And obviously I was now most definitely in the mood for London, so decided to use my spare two hours to have a leisurely stroll down from St Pancras to Victoria. It was lovely strolling through the restaurants of Holborn and theatres of Covent Garden. I crossed over the river on Waterloo Bridge, and had a wander along the South Bank from there to the London Eye, which was teeming with book fairs, mime artists and street performers, all lining the bank of the Thames. And then back over Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Palace, and upto Victoria station. Ok I cut it a little fine, but it was well worth it.