I didn’t
sleep well for some reason. I got up about an hour earlier than I had planned,
and over brekkie watched the last episode of “Catch 22”. The series has
been watchable, but odd. In six episodes nothing much really happened, and the last
episode followed in much the same vein. After an hour they just ran the closing
credits with no real ending to the show. Looking on-line it would seem that the
book ended equally vaguely. I can remember having the book (years ago)
but can’t really remember much about it. If it was anything like the TV
adaptation, now I know why.
With
telly finished I had a look at the Internet. This week is the week-long
national geo-meet up in Aberdeen. I hadn’t realised that the thing was a
week-long extravaganza; I thought it was only over the weekend. Had I known I
might have made the effort to have gone; after all I’ve got the week off work.
Such a shame that I didn’t realise this. Mind you, many of these events seem to
be a closely-guarded secret. I’ve lost count of the number of mega-events that
I’ve found out about *after* they’ve happened. There was one such last
weekend that I only found out about this morning.
I got
myself organised and wandered up to the train station. I tried to buy a ticket
for the eight-oh-three train to Charing Cross. The nice man behind the counter wouldn’t
sell me one. That wasn’t a cheap rate train (he said). I told him that
the Internet said it was. He rolled his eyes and explained to me what kind of
half-wit believes what they read on the Internet. So I bought an off-peak
ticket for the eight-twenty-nine to Charing Cross. I then went to the ticket
barrier where the nice man said that I *could* use the off-peak ticket on
the eight-oh-three train to Charing Cross, and implied that only a half-wit
would listen to the nice man at the ticket office said.
Customer
service has never been a strong point for railway staff, has it?
I found
a free newspaper, and did the crossword as the train took me to London. Once at
Charing Cross I soon found Karl, and we took to the underground. Hot, noisy,
smelly… so many people packed in like sardines.
We got
to Hyde Park Corner and went for a little walk. I don’t really know London, so
(as usual) our route was laid out by geocaches. Many of them were
Earthcaches which took us to the rather obscure parts of the capital; the sorts
of places that the tourists don’t usually find. One of the other caches had a
field puzzle which had me playing a strange version of hopscotch outside the
head office of the BBC. We met up with some Czech cachers in an obscure
alleyway used in the Harry Potter films. And we found one of the cheekiest
hides ever.
It was a
shame that we drew blanks in Goodge Street and at St Anne’s in Westminster, but
you can’t have everything.
As we
walked we found ourselves in Leicester Square. I thought we might divert to the
Lego shop for five minutes. Have you ever been to the Lego shop in Leicester
Square? The queue to get into the place was probably over a hundred yards long.
Stuff that!
We had a
rather good stilton ploughman’s for lunch, and with walk walked we had a pint
of porter in Covent garden’s iconic
Harp.
I
took a few photos whilst we were out.
Despite
the noisy toddlers watching Peppa Pig videos on the train home I slept for much
of the way. Strangely the Peppa Pig videos being turned off at Paddock Wood
woke me, and I picked up the newspaper that the toddlers’ mother had left and
did that paper’s crossword until the train got us back to Ashford.
I got
home at almost exactly the same time as "er indoors TM",
and we took the dogs round the park. Pogo was a tad wilful, but there was no
squabbling with other dogs, and as walks went this was a good one.
With walk
walked we had a very good bit of dinner, then I set about doing the homework
from the London trip. Earthcaches are akin to geology homework… I’ve sent in
eight sets of answers to questions. I hope I’ve got the answers right…
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