Tales of a Shoebox Princess

 Our last day! We stayed close by the hotel today because we were still in the COVID-testing-before-flying-into-the-USA phase (which was dropped just weeks or even DAYS after we went back home). We had a virtual appointment for testing that afternoon and it hung over all we did that morning. We were concerned that somehow we would test positive and while it would be fun to stay longer, we would have had to quarantine, which meant we wouldn't actually have fun.  In order to stay close by our hotel, but still do tourtisty stuff, we indulged in the Portabello Road street market. It's BLOCKS long and way packed! There are food stands, trinkets, crafts, t-shirts, other clothes...everything.  I sent this picture to my brother, who has a thing for communism (he's not a communist, just likes to argue about it or just appreciate Soviet Industrial architecture or Soviet propaganda posters). I think I would take this tour, although my knowledge of Karl Marx is limited to the Monty P...

Between this day and the Abbey Road day, we have fulfilled all of Jim's achievable Beatles' related bucket list items. Note that I said achievable; he'd probably really like to get a VIP ticket to a Beatles concert, but that will not be happening. He is going to a Ringo concert later in the year and that will bring his total of Beatles that he has seen play in concert to two. Sadly he was never able to see John and George (although if the Traveling Wilburys had ever traveled, we would have gone even further into debt to see them because they are the absolute bomb of a supergroup) We took a train from Euston station in London to Liverpool and boy howdy, the train is THE way to travel from London to other cities in the UK. I cannot tell you how much I appreciated the public transportation system in the UK.  We did get lost once we got off the train, since we weren't used to transportation in Liverpool, and we walked and walked and walked and Jim couldn't get google ma...

When we started planning this trip, we had lots of activities to choose from for daytime activities, but other than going to the performance of The Mousetrap, we hadn't quite found anything to do in the evening besides go out to eat. Then one of our friends (same one who had mentioned The Witchery restaurant) told us of a Jack the Ripper tour they went on in London that they enjoyed, and I thought that would be a fun evening event. And it was! We walked down lots of alleys, heard gory stories of murder and evisceration, saw bits of London that we wouldn't have seen, and got our heads filled with several theories on who Jack the Ripper was. Our tour began near the Aldgate East tube station, near the Whitechapel art gallery. I think several tours started there and our guide separated people out for various groups. We visited several of the locations where Jack the Ripper's victims were found, places they were known to frequent while they were alive, and given interesting narr...

Uploading pictures from Google photos is irritating because most of the time, it arranges the pictures from newest to oldest and then I have to rearrange them all individually and it's time consuming. I'm not going to do that with this post so you'll get them in reverse order, because it doesn't really matter for this particular post. After Westminster Abbey, we crossed the bridge to wait out the time until our reservation for the London Eye. We round a lovely park to wait in, but as we sat for a bit, we got increasingly cold. We finally googled a clothing shop so we could buy something warm to wear. Jim finally located a shop, and we got a little lost getting there. Turns out the shop was inside an underground/train station. The shop was called FatFace and I chuckled at the whimsy of the name. Fortunately, they had a sweatshirt in my size and a jacket in Jim's. We walked back to the park (Jubilee Park, where we saw lots of school kids in their class uniforms walkin...