When I started this blog all the back in the long, long ago year 2011, the whole purpose was just to keep my friends and family updated on what I was up to – I was at the start of a multi-year assignment in Germany for my job, and I figured the blog format was the way to go. Through my time abroad, I fell into a travel blog format, because I was going all over the place and there was always something fascinating to see and to share. In more recent years, especially since 2020, I hadn’t been traveling as much. I did manage to squeeze in two international trips last year, and I want to talk about both of them. I’ll start with the second one, because it was just in November.

I realized as we approached the Thanksgiving holiday that I had the actual Thursday and Friday of the holiday off work, so if I took the Monday and Tuesday of the following week, I could have a solid five day visit to my favorite city in all the world – London!

I didn’t choose London as a destination just because I love the city- I chose it because there was a revival of Starlight Express running there in Wembley, and I desperately wanted to see it. Long time readers of this blog will recall that I’m a huge musical theater nerd, and that I went to Bochum to see the German version of Starlight that had been running there continuously since 1989. I never got to see the original 1984 version of the show, however, despite loving the crap out of it since I first heard it. It did run on Broadway for a while, but I was still a proto-Steven and could not travel on my own yet to see things.

Not so, now – I had the time off, and the money, and only needed the reason to go- and now I had it. I got myself some airfare, booked the Starlight ticket, reserved a hotel with points that was located in a convenient location, and set about populating my trip with Cool Shit To Do™. Then on the Wednesday night, I took Metro to the airport and hopped across the Atlantic Ocean.

Strap in, folks- this is going to be a long one. I’ll take it day by day.

Day One: Thursday the 27th of November –

My flight got into Heathrow around 10am, and getting through customs and passport control at the airport didn’t take all that long. The Heathrow Express took me from the airport straight to Paddington Station. My first order of business was finding the Paddington statue in Paddington Station. This might be my foggy recollection, but I’m pretty sure he’s been moved since I was last there about ten years prior.

From there, it was a short walk to my hotel to check in and drop off my bag. My original plan was to walk around a bit, perhaps over to Hyde Park, but I can’t sleep on airplanes and I was a bit shattered as a result, so I instead had a bite in the hotel restaurant while I waited for my room to be ready. This was the first of many great sandwiches on this trip – a delightful tuna and cucumber sandwich. England’s sandwich game is strong, and I still have dreams about the things I ate from the M&S Food store.

That didn’t take long, and I was able to have a brief nap in the hotel room before heading out for the evening’s plans. On my way to the Tube, I stumbled across public art – The Wild Table of Love. It turns out this (or a duplicate of this) is presently in New York as well, but I don’t think I’ll have a chance to go find it.

While this is not important to my story, it made me laugh and I would have failed my readers if I did not also give you a chance to laugh at this bus:

Onward to the Tube! I was delighted and surprised to learn that the Oyster Card I had purchased for my very first trip to London in 2012 still worked perfectly- it even had a remaining balance of a little over £10 to get me started.

I rode the Tube to the Electric Ballroom on Camden High Street for Pop Will Eat Itself, an alt-rock band that started in the 1980s. It was an exceptionally good show, and I’m glad I was able to manage it.

At no point on this entire day did I remember that it was Thanksgiving back in the States.

Day two: Friday the 28th of November –

I woke up, and hopped over to South Kensington for a behind the scenes tour of the Royal Albert Hall. I had been to the Royal Albert twice before for glorious performances, but a tour is a fascinating look behind the scenes.

I have a fondness for visiting what, to my mind, are the holy places of music and performance. The Ryman in Nashville. Chess Records in Chicago. You get the idea. The Royal Albert Hall tour was like that for me.

After the tour, I took the Tube over to Blackfriars to go to St Paul’s Cathedral. Longtime readers of this blog also know that I am a bit King-Kongy, in that whenever I’m in a new city, I like to find the tallest thing around and climb it. I had previously been to the Shard, which is obviously much taller, but St. Paul’s has a self guided tour which you can take, and which allows you to climb the Dome, up to the three Dome Galleries. The three galleries are basically levels at which you can stop climbing to look around, before going on to the next level. They’re called the Whispering Gallery, the Stone Gallery and the Golden Gallery, but honestly I missed how they go their names – I was too busy climbing and panting. All those steps were a lot easier when I was in my thirties.

Totally worth it, though. Check out the view from the top!

After St. Pauls, I went back to the hotel for a short break before the evening’s festivities, but not before a quick burger and beer at a really great local spot.

In the evening, before taking in a show at the West End, I decided to check out a little sculpture walk called the “Scenes in the Square Sculpture Trail” in Leicester Square. My goal of seeing most of the sculptures was complicated enormously by the GIANT FRICKING CHRISTMAS MARKET going on. Solid pun on the ice skating rink though:

Here’s the parts of the sculpture walk I did find – you can see a complete list of the sculptures on the official site.

After I was done there, I walked to the theater for the evening’s real entertainment: Disney’s Hercules. I’ve always liked the music from this one, and I was skeptical about translating it to the stage, but it actually worked really well.

Day three, Saturday the 29th of November –

On Saturday, I had a leisurely start because the first scheduled event of the day was the show that prompted this entire trip – a matinee of the new revival of Starlight Express!

It was so, so good. My inner twelve year old was delighted. This show is reportedly touring internationally in 2027, and I am here for it.

After Starlight Express rocked my socks off, I grabbed a quick dinner before starting a walking tour of London’s Historical Pubs. This tour was fascinating as hell, and I was well and truly buzzed by the end of it.

This next picture is not really important to the retelling, but I just liked how the tunnel between tube lines looked:

Day four, Sunday the 30th of November –

Lunch at a pretty great place in Hammersmith called “Charlotte’s Cloud,” before walking over to Riverside Studios. Riverside Studios was founded in the 1930s as a film studio. It became a BBC television studio later, and some of Doctor Who’s earliest episodes were filmed there. The blue plaque pictured below is about Verity Lambert, the founding producer of Doctor Who.

Nowadays, it’s an arts center with facilities capable of hosting fairly amazing shows. I was there for the immersive Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy experience/show. It was a fully interactive “play” rather than the kind where you sit in place and watch the story on a proscenium stage. The night started in a working bar, at a surprise party for one Arthur Dent.

Ford Prefect talked to me a bit before things started and as a result, I was referred to for the rest of the night as “David from Virginia.” I'”‘m still not sure whether he misheard me or simply chose to misname me for comedic effect, but I was David for the rest of the evening. At one point, Arthur Dent joked that “David rules the state of Virginia with an iron fist.” It was that kind of a night.

Day five, Monday, the 1st of December –

Met up with my dear friend Charlotte. When we first met, she she also lived in Germany and had a WordPress blog. We’ve kept in touch in the years since, and even met up when we were both in Tokyo. This makes the third country in which we’ve seen one another, which is kind of amazing. We had lunch and walked around a bit.

We also stopped at Liberty, a famous department store that’s been around for 150 years.

While we were walking around, we stumbled across this very funny reminder that the month of December had begun:

Lastly, we tried to go up the Fenchurch Building (the one that looks like a walkie-talkie), but it was closed that day, so we wound up finding another tall building called Horizon 22 with an observation deck instead.

In the evening, I went to see Hans Zimmer at the O2 Arena. In the days before this trip, I waffled between the Hans Zimmer show and Roxette playing across town, and in hindsight I wish I’d gone to see Roxette. The O2 was uncomfortable for me, and I was so far away from the stage that it was like watching an animated musical postage stamp. I think I would have had more fun at Roxette. Oh well, sometimes I make bad choices.

Day six, Tuesday, the 2nd of December –

It was time to head back to the airport to fly home. London is just like Disney in one regard: You exit through the gift shop.

I had wanted to wake up in London on my birthday, and in that I was successful. I was kind of hoping that the actual minute of my birth would occur in international airspace so that my birthday would be negated and I wouldn’t age another year. That plan was a bust though, because we were already over Canadian airspace by the time that minute rolled around.

Still, the international travel made my birthday last 29 hours. That’s quite something, isn’t it?

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