Thursday-Friday • Saturday • Sunday
In and around London
Saturday, 13 April 2002
I woke up on Saturday morning refreshed. Marianne and I made our way to the hotel, where we were going to meet the rest of the group for an open-topped bus tour. Michael, Marianne's boyfriend, met us at the hotel and we set off for the bus stop. Got our tickets, and though it was cold and overcast, we sat on the top level. Well, you have to, don't you? You can't take an open-topped bus tour and sit on the bottom! So, freezing, we made our way around the tourist areas of London. Much of the tour went along or near the marathon route, so that gave Chris a chance to see parts of the city that's we'd "tour" on Sunday.
When the cold got to be unbearable, we got off for lunch. Had bangers and mash (my absolute favorite British dish and perfect for such a day) at a warm pub on the south bank of the river. I was getting nervous because we were meeting some people for dinner that evening, and I always get nervous meeting new people. Not that they were new, really. It was Mike and Ian and Uli (and their respective partners), other runners who also had websites about their training, and we'd been swapping tips and stories for months, throughout our training. I was excited to be meeting them after all this time, but still nervous.
After lunch, we got back on the bus, and froze again until we got to Embankment, where we disembarked to go on a river cruise. I'd never done that before. It was fun, we went all the way to Tower Bridge and back. Nice to see the city from a different perspective. Plus, it was warm inside the boat. :) After we were nicely thawed, we got back on the bus, with the plan to ride up to Marble Arch and walk down Oxford Street to the restaurant where we had dinner reservations. We got a waylayed at Trafalgar Square, where there was a huge (but thankfully peaceful) Palestinian demonstration.
At a hotel giftshop near Marble Arch (one of the areas, incidentally, where Marianne, Kristina, Anne and I lived for a while) Marianne bought me a London Underground game. A "running the marathon" present. Tee hee! I love the Underground. We played it later that night. :)
We made our way down Oxford Street (foot traffic, miraculously, wasn't too bad for a Saturday afternoon) to Regent Street and went in Hamleys, a huge toy store where Chris and Rebecca bought a gift for a friend's baby. We almost lost some of the group in there, off playing with the toys.
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| Me and Chris at the pasta dinner. I'm letting Mike remain incognito. But that's his arm to the left of me! |
We got to the restaurant at 5:00 on the dot, and Ian and his wife, Jacqui and Mike and his wife Ruth and his son Thomas were already there. I made Chris walk in first. :) Everyone was, of course, really nice, and soon Vicky and her husband showed up, as well as Uli and his partner and another pair of runners, whose names I never caught. (Well, they were at the other end of the table.) Everyone got along well, even though the runners were all pretty nervous. Vicky wasn't running the marathon, but she had done the Dublin Marathon, so she was able to give us first-time marathoners some advice.
Yummy food was eaten, but wine was not. Too bad, it smelled really good. I'm not even a big wine drinker, I guess it's only because I couldn't have any. Ha ha. So after a few hours of chatting, eating, and having a grand old time, we all headed off, back to our respective beds to get ready for the big day ahead of us.
