Thursday, September 21, 2017

London, England

Today was a travel day, sort of.

I wanted to make sure how to get to the airport on Saturday and which terminal I needed to go to. Everybody said it's about an hour by the Underground and the online information about my flight said I needed to go to terminal 3.

It turns out both were wrong.

It took a little over an hour and a half to get there. When I got to terminal 3, the board said Ibera Airlines checking was in terminal 5. After getting to Terminal 5, I found where to check in.

The evening before, I was talking to the barista in the hotel coffee shop, a young lady from Romania, and she said her favorite place to go in London was the National Art Gallery. My guide book highly recommended it, so that's where I spent the afternoon. It was well worth it.

The Leicester (pronounced lester) Square underground station is on the edge of the theatre district. You pop out among all these tiny theatres and restaurants. Walk a few blocks (not that they have blocks here) and around a corner into Trafalgar Square:



The main feature is Nelson's Column. It commemorates Nelson's naval victory over the French at Cape Trafalgar on the Atlantic coast of Spain in 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars. It effectively ended Napoleon's plans to invade England and secured the naval supremacy of England.

Inside the museum is amazing. About 75 rooms with paintings going back nearly 800 years. And there are famous names: da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Titian, van Dyke, Rembrandt, Rafael, van Gogh and on and on. So many rooms you get lost:




I spent 3 hours and barely touched it.



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