Abbey Road and The Mousetrap

Breakfast at a tiny diner across the street from our hotel. The menu was mostly omelet based, and that worked just fine for us. Mine had spinach and mushrooms in it.

Brits are big on toast and fortunately they do like veg for breakfast. 

Our main goal during the daytime was to visit Abbey Road. This was probably the biggest bucket list item for Jim (maybe tied with Liverpool?). We hopped on one of the many buses and tootled our way over to Abbey Road. 

And here we are! I like all the graffiti on the gate posts. 

Jim didn't believe me at first when I told him there was an Abbey Road store under the actual building. He said, it's probably just for employees. I walked down this sidewalk and looked in the door and confirmed that I was right. It was open to the public. We went in and Jim wanted to buy nearly everything in the store. They had some other bands, but most of it was Beatles-oriented. 

We did not go up these stairs. 

This is a live cam that watches Abbey Road all day long. There is a website that you can watch the livestream of people crossing the street. 

Jim crosses the street. He looked at the photos I took, decided he wasn't satisfied with the photos, and wanted to cross again.

He approved of this one and the next one. 

I think he could have spent all day crossing Abbey Road. I was taking a picture from a monument marker in the middle of the road at the nearby intersection. 

After crossing Abbey Road, Jim wanted to stop by one of Paul McCartney's houses. He has owned it since his Beatle days. It's just a few blocks from the studio, so when they took a break from recording, they all came over here to hang out. 

We had lunch at a fair-trade organic place nearby. I had fish and sweet potato chips.

Jim had fried chicken.

Jim had a brownie and I had an apricot tart.

After lunch, Katie messaged us and told us to go back to Abbey Road so she could watch us on the live stream. I had messaged her earlier when we first got to Abbey Road, but she was asleep. Now she was awake and wanted to watch her dad walk on Abbey Road. We texted her while crossing and she and Caroline were watching (Caroline called it a "stupid street"). We got to interact in real time through the magic of the livestream camera (and microphone, because they could hear us when we went to stand under the camera) and they texted us back to say they could see us. I think Katie has pictures of us crossing the street. 

Later that evening we headed to Paddington Station where we saw a familiar bear.

We ate dinner at an indoor market

And then I got to do something I'd wanted to do since high school 

I was in The Mousetrap my senior year in high school. I played Mollie Ralston--my only role onstage in high school. The director had someone else in mind for the role, but that person didn't try out. So I was the lucky one! I'm in the red sweater. I had so much fun being in a play! I had tried out for a musical when I was a freshman, but I didn't even make callbacks. I worked backstage for a few other plays (The Curious Savage and a Thurber Carnival) and I was in the pit orchestra for Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat earlier my senior year. 

Intense scene practice! 

I'm a little older now and could not play Mollie Ralston anymore. I could do Mrs. Boyle though. And just for my own information, the actor pictured as both Mollie Ralston and Mrs. Boyle were not in the performance we attended. No matter. I don't care who played who, I just wanted to see a performance at the longest running play ever (that I happened to be in during my senior year in high school) while we were in London. I think we bought the play tickets soon after we bought our plane tickets--the first thing we scheduled.

The St Martin's theater has very tiny seats. I literally had to shove my hips down between the arm rests, and the railing was very close so that my knees were right up against it. The person squeezed next to me (not Jim) mentioned the small size and I said "we're going to be snug." 

I remembered several lines. I wonder if I still have my copy of the script from all those years ago? Somewhere in my many storage bins it might be languishing. I'll have to look for it.