slowly she turned

On May 12, 2024, my sister Lisa and my friend Susan and I traveled from Raleigh Durham airport to London, via Boston and on Jet Blue. I just want to mention briefly that the Jet Blue experience was great for the three of us. We were surprised at how good the food was, and that free mixed drink on the way to London came in handy for settling down for an overnight flight. Not that I slept. We turned out to be excellent traveling companions, but that was no surprise to me.

We were staying in an iBis hotel on the edge of Chelsea and Earl’s Court, and it turned out to be under heavy renovation. Maybe this is why, when we trudged in at 10 a.m., they were quite generous in letting us check into rooms early. We were exhausted enough that we managed to get some napping in that day despite the drilling and hammering.

Just down the street was a pub called the Lillie Langtry, and we walked down there for a mid-afternoon lunch. I probably ate healthier here than I did for days (that’s jackfruit), and had to document my first meal and Guinness in London. The chips were REALLY good.

Then, we decided to walk up the street and check out what appeared to be an abandoned cemetery on our way in. Oh no, it was not. It was the huge Brompton Cemetery, a Royal Park dating back to 1840, “where the entire landscape was conceived as a garden as valuable for the living as for the dead.” The overgrown wildflowers and “weeds” were deliberate. There were forget-me-nots in bloom everywhere. This may have been my favorite place I visited in London. If my phone battery had not died, I would have taken many, many more photos.

We crashed again for a little while, and then Lisa and I walked to a wonderful pub called The Fox and Pheasant and had a late dinner. I had the chicken pie, and Lisa had pork belly. It was a much longer walk that we had anticipated, so we caught an Uber back, which was really easy.