I have made a monumental life decision today. If I intend to continue paying for the things I enjoy in life, like electricity, my car insurance, groceries, I can cross "photographer" off my list of career choices. Basically, when it comes to photographs, I stink. I can do the basic stuff, sure, here's where we were today, this is what we saw today, but when it comes to pictures that make people go "Wow – what a great shot" that will never be me. I'll stick with my day job.
Today, we had the opportunity to take fantastic pictures. We began in Regent's Park in the Rose Gardens. I have never seen so many roses in my life, I actually didn't even know that there were this many different kinds of roses. We wandered through, taking pictures of one gorgeous rose right after another. According to the Royal Parks website, there are over 30,000 roses and over 400 varieties. There were red one, white ones, yellow ones, and pink ones, some that were an orangey color. My favorite ones are pink and yellow together. I think they are called Fulton MacKay roses. My other favorite is the Nostalgia, which is white, but has pink or red just on the edges of the roses. I didn't see any that were ugly. The grass is perfectly manicured and it is just amazing to look at the ocean of roses. Today was a nice sunny day, and the only mar in an otherwise beautiful morning was the man sitting on a bench in just a Speedo swimsuit. I guess he wanted to enjoy the roses and the sunshine, but it wasn't such a pretty sight for the rest of us. . .
We wandered through the park some more, and ended up on Primrose Hill, which apparently is one of only two hills in all of London. (One of our Blue Badge guides told us that - the other is where St. Paul's is located, I think.) Climbing to the top was not easy – my calf muscles were NOT happy. But the view from the top was worth it. We ate our lunch with London spread out beneath us. Then we flew kites, just like they did at the end of Mary Poppins. It was very difficult to keep from singing "Let's Go Fly a Kite" but I managed to restrain myself after only one round. Actually, climbing to the top, I didn't have enough air to sing anything. I forgot my kite, I remembered it in the check in line at the Orlando airport, so Andrea let me fly hers, and Dr E offered to let me fly hers, but hers was inflatable and I was worried about popping it. We had an amazing variety of kites, an owl, a ladybug, Dr. Seuss, Dr. E's blow up Winnie the Pooh, Hello Kitty, and two other Winnie the Pooh kites, and Linda's dragon, which was seriously cool. Linda's flew like a dragon, swirling and diving. The wind was pretty strong and it was pretty to see all the kites in the sky. Of course, my pictures of the kite flying turned out awful, as it was hard to see what I was aiming at. One more reason I won't be opening up shop as a photographer. After we flew the kites, everybody gave them away to children nearby, so even after we left, Hello Kitty, and the owl, and some others were still flying.
We went back down the hill, which was MUCH easier, to the London Zoo. We went through the Zoo backwards, so my first glimpse of animals was some sort of predatory bird (the cage said Golden eagle, but I'm not sure!) carrying a chick in its beak. I'm not sure if it was its own chick or a chicken chick, but he/she/it was carrying the poor dead chick, and then it took it over behind a bush and ripped the chick's head off and ate it. That was my introduction to the London Zoo. Let me say, the PB and J from lunch was not sitting so well. We wandered on past some kind of vulture, who was enjoying some small furry creature for lunch. He was pulling out entrails and seemed to be enjoying his lunch very much. Second glimpse of animals in the zoo. Yay. We moved on to gorillas, and couldn't figure out why the water in their water bottles was brown. We watched the keeper hide their food out in the grass, so they could forage. We went into the petting zoo part, but didn't pet anything, even though there were sheep. I think I caught a glimpse of a roadrunner, but could never get to it to see if that is what it really was. We spent lots of time at the penguin pool. I love penguins. I think they are so cute. None of the penguins would swim for us. Two or three kept teasing us, walking right on the edge, and I would swear to you one stuck in his toe to test the water and then walked away. One was posing, so we could get great shots of him. Okay, other people may have great shots of him; I have pictures of the penguin.
Tomorrow early, Katherine and I leave for a weekend in Paris. I'm sure I'll have lots of pictures when we get back. Right now, I'm just worried about being carsick on the coach. I do have some great herbal motion sickness medicine that Andrea gave me, so 5 hours on a coach, let's hope it works. We leave from Dover, so we will get to see the "White Cliffs of Dover", which I'm pretty excited about. I also can't wait to get pain au chocolat. I did check out a French English dictionary from the library. I think I'll mark the word for bathroom ahead of time.
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