billbauer

We haven't shared our breakfast with you yet this week.  It is simply a garden variety hotel breakfast, fancied up a bit but basically ordinary.  Except that it is served in the hotel's Palm Court which, at one time, was rather elegant.  A newspaper article on display depicts the room in the early 1900s. And here is Beverly at breakfast in the same space. As we depart London today, I leave you impressions of London-style skylit roofs.  They are the temperate house in Kew Gardens, the "hive" at Kew Gardens, the Tate Modern Museum and the Borough Market. Our flight home was uneventful.  Well, except that we were upgraded to Comfort+, a pleasant surprise. The Bauer travel blog now goes dormant until our next adventure.

You have probably noticed that we have been sleeping late every morning.  Today we finally overdid it, arising too late to make the hotel breakfast.  But, since this is London, there is a Starbucks right around the corner. I have been contemplating a new suitcase.  While shopping in Covent Gardens a couple of days ago, it came to my attention that, due to the current valuation of the British Pound and the refund of the VAT, that my new suitcase was cheaper to purchase in the UK than back at home in the US.  And it fits, barely, within my duty free allowance coming back into the US.  So I now have a new suitcase.  This morning we are off to the Global Blue Lounge, courtesy of the suitcase retailer, who does all of the required paperwork and provides the VAT refund on the spot.  The only other thing that I need to do is to obtain the customs stamp at the airport.  Easy peasy. This is a building that I found particularly attractive while on the way to Green Park. From Green Park,

Although our favorite bookstore in the world is Redbery Books, we're off this morning on a jaunt to visit Persephone Books, a unique bookstore that reprints neglected mid-twentieth century (mostly) women writers.  All of the books have an identical, elegant grey jacket.  But each book has a unique "fabric" endpaper matching the period in which the book was written.  It is London and for the first time we wear our rain jackets in a light shower. We head back to one of our favorite shopping areas in London: Covent Garden with street performers most every day and an Apple store.  This is the interior of the Apple store. After our disappointment with dinner last evening, for lunch today we do the tried and true, a traditional British pub, in this case the Round House near Covent Garden and have traditional fish & chips although with a non-traditional glass of wine rather than a pint of ale.  Yes, a food picture! We doubled up today with both aftern

Yes, I promised you five plays in five days and we will get there.  But today in mid-week we take a break from theatre.  We thought we would sleep late again, which we did, see a couple of attractions and save the evening for a nice meal at a great restaurant.  The day was mostly successful. I have wanted to see the Tate Modern Museum and today is the day. This is a photo of the main central hall.  Towers on either side of this central hall house the collection.  The museum building used to be a power generating station and in this hall were the generating turbines.  Interesting to me is when I move around and photograph I like to have location information so that I know where I was when a particular photo was taken.  Unfortunately, my cameras don't have GPS.  So I also take a photo with my iPhone, which does have GPS, for the location information.  I did that here.  Upon reviewing the photos, I decided that I liked the iPhone photo better than regular photos taken at this sam