On my last day in London I went to Buckingham Palace but changed my mind when the rain started coming down and I saw all of the protesters yelling about Bush arriving on Tuesday. Instead I turned around and headed up the road to Westminster Abbey to kill a few hours in a warmer, drier, and certainly quieter environment.
After a tour, I went to lunch at a pub, had a proper meal of fish & chips with a pint of ale, then made a quick tour of the Natural History Museum and the Baden-Powell House. I went back to my hotel, collected my luggage and, after a run-in at the Gloucester Road Underground Station with a pretty Polish girl, a confused ticket collector who got it in his head that I was carrying a bomb, and an Underground security guard who straightened out the mess, I banged up my hand on the train car door and headed off to Heathrow for my flight home.
I arrived safely back in the U.S. at 8 p.m. local time on Monday night, having made it through customs without any difficulty--they don't look at you twice when you tell them you're an English Teacher.
