After checking out of the hostel I took a trip around Oxford to find a card store because, of course, I forgot to buy a wedding card for Adrienne and Ian. I queued up (goofy British term for "I got in line") for the register and passed an endcap display for "Smashing Items". I found this exceptionally funny, as my head ran through the idea of selling things that were to be taken home and smashed. I seem to remember a great deal of the merchandise was made of glass, adding to the hilarity that only I found, since I was probably the only American in the place. I was actually quite a threat to smash the display at the time, not so much for intent as much as the fact I was carrying a large, unwieldy backpack that extended out of my back a surprisingly large distance, especially with the zip-off daypack that was rather like a porch on my luggage. Walking with this thing was very similar to driving a truck in that I had to be very careful when I moved. Backing up was a serious chore, indeed it was best never done, and any quick turns could have easily and quickly turned into a Three Stooges skit.

After my purchase, I caught some breakfast at a sort of enclosed market that felt like an open-air market (Like the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles, for those who are familiar). I cannot recall the name of the market, but I do distinctly remember grabbing a danish and a coffee in a small café whose name I also cannot remember. After that, I wandered around the shops until I eventually exited onto a street, whereupon I realized I had somehow crossed that street while glancing in storefront windows. I still have no idea how this happened, but I was more than a little freaked out when I noticed I had done this. I like to think that I had gotten my bearings confused while I was navigating the tangle of stores, but another part of me says that, if I ever enter the place again I could easily take another exit that would drop me off in central Bombay. To this day, that whole episode has me baffled.

Anyway, with my big, stupid pack I trudged through a couple alleyways that I missed the previous day before deciding that I really didn’t need to see that much more of Oxford and it was time to set out for London. I grabbed a train back and plotted my next course.

I would be arriving in Paddington Station (yes, like the bear) in the northwest corner of central London and my train to Woking would be leaving from Waterloo Station in the south-central portion of central London. Thus, having plenty of time to kill, I would walk the distance between the two and see a great many of the sights that are generally between the two stations such as Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Parliament and Big Ben. I mapped out a rough course and, upon arriving in Paddington, I strapped on my backpack and set forth into the city.

There is actually a word for the sort of sightseeing I was about to perform. That word is "dumb". I had only a vague idea of where I was going, I was not going to be looking at any sort of map, the central London area is pretty large, I had already blistered some of my toes and I was carrying a pack weighing somewhere in the neighborhood of forty or fifty pounds. Only an imbecile would try to walk the 4-5 miles between Paddington and Waterloo Stations in such a condition. Of course, this was not abundantly clear to me at the time; thus my intelligence is under severe question.

Not but a couple of streets this latest London adventure, I without so much as an idea of where the hell Hyde Park was to be found. This is not easy to do because Hyde Park is only a couple blocks away from Paddington, but I still managed to get thoroughly lost. I tromped from street to street unsure where I was going for probably a good half an hour before happening upon an area that looked to be promisingly green. I walked up to it and, mercifully, saw a sign for Hyde Park, allowing my trek began in earnest. I entered near some manner of scenic fountain and pool combination that I admired for a bit, though I have no idea what the name of it is either, or even if they’d bothered to name it, though presumably they were wise enough to do so. Then I set out in what was sort of the right direction, viewing statues of Peter Pan, some guy on a horse whose name I also cannot recall, eventually coming across a very large monument to what could best be described as the Not Quite Arts.

Each corner of the monument held a statue commemorating commerce or engineering or manufacturing or whatever the fourth corner was. It was quite a monument, I have to admit. It covered a great deal of area and a lot of time and detail had gone into the statuary of which it consisted; I was very impressed. Presumably it was put there by some king or queen or lord or something who figured all the good stuff to commemorate had already been taken, thus "tradesmen" seemed to be something that could still be covered. Anyway, this monument was on the boundary of the park and the city, so I was adding mileage by hike by tracing a zigzag pattern across the area.

By the way, it was cloudy and about sixty degrees Fahrenheit with a light wind at the time. I was in a T-shirt and I was sweating. It was quickly becoming clear this was not going to be at all easy.

I exited Hyde Park at the point I was expecting to exit and, thank God, there was a large map posted there where I could figure out the next leg of my tour. My next step was, of course, to walk through another park.

I’m fairly certain it was Green Park I was traversing, though looking at maps now leads to some confusion, it was either Green Park or Buckingham Palace Gardens. I’m fairly certain it was Green Park, however, because it did not seem very gardeny and it was very, very, very… very long. The park has a wide, tree lined trail running through the middle that is intersected by a great many small, perpendicular walkways. Comparatively, Hyde Park wasn’t so bad to traverse; the trails meandered through it, giving one a sense of getting somewhere and there were monuments and arrows and ponds and such scattered throughout, altering the scenery. Green Park, however, was like walking on a treadmill. One area is almost completely indistinguishable from the next and I was walking the same damned trail for what seemed like forever. I stopped there for an awful hotdog that was good enough for someone who had eaten nothing all day except a danish and resting allowed me to unstrap my cargo and radiate a spare ten degrees of body heat into the atmosphere.

Upon finishing my meal, I returned my backpack to its wrongful place and walked what seemed to be another sixteen miles through Green Park before arriving at its end. Fortunately, there was a signpost directing me toward Buckingham Palace. On the downside, those who have read last year’s account of London know the worth of those signposts and the way to Buckingham Palace was apparently directly through a couple of guardrails and a construction site. If I ever meet the pomey bastard who decided where and how to affix those directional signs, I will kill him.

After a slow, deliberate, resigned exhale, I performed a looping slalom around these obstacles and, a few sidewalks later, I entered into the area of Buckingham Palace.

I looked at Buckingham Palace to make sure that, yes, it was still there. So were the guards, though they were not going to be changing anytime soon. I guess the normal cadre of red-coated, big-fuzzy-hatted men were taking a break because the men guarding the place were in naval uniforms and, instead of the submachine guns, they were using much more gentlemanly rifles. I guess the queen was expecting fewer and slower moving threats to her safety that day.

Passing the statue of Queen Victoria (yep, she still looks exactly like Winston Churchill), I continued my walk through St. James Park; past the landscaped flowers and greenery, the black swans, a couple hordes of schoolchilren and a very determined squirrel moving an apple that could not have weighed much less than he/she did. It was a mostly straight path I followed through the center of the park that was heading toward an archway I remembered from my previous visit. This archway led from a large, graveled, open area through a line of buildings and onto to a street I would be able to follow toward Parliament, a nice little shortcut. However…

There was a temporary chain-link fence in the way with a sign telling me that construction was going on and therefore I would be unable to cross the street there. "Okay," I thought to myself, "No problem." Then I saw a man in battle fatigues and a beret and I thought, "Okay, I guess they’re really concerned about security." I took a left turn at the fence to walk around the construction site and that was when I saw the small tracked vehicle. You know, the one towing the field artillery piece. "Okay, just what the hell are they securing against?" I asked myself. Then I noticed there was a whole line of small, tracked vehicles that were all towing light artillery. Now then, there was one of two things going on at that location and no matter what, either I or the people working the site were very confused. Despite my limited civil engineering experience, I did not know of any cannon-based construction methods and everything I was familiar that involved the use of high-speed projectiles sure as hell wouldn’t be labeled "construction". However, there appeared to be a grandstand going up behind the military equipment, making everything that much stranger, because I’d never figured temporary bleachers to be much of a security problem.

Following a long, very confused walk past the "construction", I came to a large multi-vaulted triumphal gate sort of thing that led me past Trafalgar Square, so the route wasn’t a complete loss. I was able to check one more sight off the typical list of "Things to See in London". There, I noticed a flier on a signpost informing passers-by that the Royal Military was having a tatoo at the previously mentioned construction site and I presumed the military equipment was there as part of the display of British military might. Things suddenly made a lot of sense. Things, of course, excluding the fact I was still travelling on foot.

Passing on the other side of the previously mentioned arched, accessway shortcut, a gaggle of tourists were doing their damndest to distract the horses underneath a pair of sword-armed (And I mean drawn-sword-armed) guards. Behind the guards and an iron fence, a troop of armed men were gathered, obviously with the intention to drill. I stood there for a bit as they were called to attention, but my attention span expired as I watched them just stand there for a minute or two, since it did not appear as though they would be marching anytime within the next couple minutes. I continued further, on foot, though by this time my own personal marching was being performed not so much for a desire to see the sights as for a simple case of overwhelming, bloody-minded stubbornness to complete my planned course. Besides, I figured there wasn’t going to be much to see in Woking, so why hurry?

Passing by Downing Street (the street the Prime Minister lives on), I took note of the enormous, moveable, street blocking, concrete vehicle barrier that was deployed a little further down for no other reason than I had never really seen one of those in action before. I must mention, for those who have not seen them in action, they are pretty big and, I have to imagine, very effective at stopping anything up to and including a tank.

I came up on Westminster Abbey, Big Ben and Parliament and thought to myself, "Seen it," as I took a pedestrian subway under an intersection. Using the nearest convenient bridge, I crossed the Thames. In case you have not guessed, I was pretty sick of walking.

Halfway across the river, the realization dawned on me that I had no idea what to do next. I had finished the part of the journey I was vaguely familiar with and now I did not know how to get to my next stop, Waterloo Station. So, on reaching the other bank, I headed a little ways down a riverside walkway in order to sit down and figure out what to do next.

I plopped myself onto an empty bench and rummaged through my pack in order to find some sort of map. Fortunately, I did not have to rely on "Let’s Go" and their crappy cartography since I’d purchased a detailed London map earlier in my journey. I examined it for only a moment before I realized I was almost right next to the station. That being surmised, I decided it was a good time to relax, because I had been walking for about four or five hours and I would still probably get to Woking well ahead of my temporary roommate.

Across the Thames.

To set the scene, Parliament and Big Ben lay directly across the Thames from my bench. The Millennium Wheel (a sort of enormous, slow moving ferris wheel) was directly to my right. In front of me, the river glided by the aging cargo ships moored in its brownish waters as a light wind ruffled the leaves above and the heart of a major world city beat all around. Random passers-by, old and young, would wander along the walk and eye me suspiciously, unsure if I was a tourist or a vagrant. Some shmoe on the bridge I had just crossed was flying a sort of spinning kite attached to a fishing pole. The kite’s action made it look a bit like a medium sized bird furiously flapping its wings while hovering in mid-air, bringing up the question of why it was attached to a fishing pole. I’m not sure I would want to catch whatever it was that would latch onto that particular lure. Either way, I sat quietly, enjoying the feeling of being someplace instead of going someplace else.

Solitude over, I had a hell of a time getting to Waterloo Station.

It wasn’t as though I couldn’t find the thing, it’s huge. Missing it would be like missing an airport. I saw it as soon as I got back onto the street. The problem was that there was no way to get there. There were none of those interpretive directional arrows and the way I thought I was supposed to go was blocked off by orange barrels surrounding a torn up street. The sky was gray, the wind was blowing and I couldn’t get there by trying to go in a straight line because of construction; it was like I never left Columbus. I did finally manage to get right next to the station, though I then had trouble getting in because almost every doorway along the wall I was following was an emergency exit. After finally finding a door for day-to-day use, I set myself toward Woking.