What else do you do on a Sunday morning in London but go to Westminster Abbey? By the time I arrived (45 minutes before the service), I joined the end of a long-ish line. I checked with the person in front of me that it was the line for the Eucharist service and it was, and it turned out she was from Brisbane, about an hour's drive up the road from home. She had been to the service previously and I followed her in, chatting about all types of things including her caring for her husband and how she took regular respite trips every 18 months or so where she would visit London and do something new each time - Churchill War Rooms this trip - visit friends in West Sussex and see one other country - Switzerland this time. We ended up in her preferred seating area - with the choir. It was amazing! As she said, it was good we were there because the seats were padded, unlike the general seating. It was my first Church of England Eucharist service (or 'bells and smells' service as someone called it) and how amazing to have experienced it in Westminster Abbey.
The person sitting on my left knew the words and the tunes for all the hymns so I. could join in without embarrassing myself. My other mission, besides the service and hearing the choristers, was to photograph the resting place of Richard III (now that he has been dug out of that carpark). There are over 3000 folk interred or remembered in Westminster Abbey and I didn't find him, because, as I found out later, he is actually in Leicester Cathedral. I did see Charles Darwin's resting place. I thought it odd: given his stance on evolution, I didn't expect to find him in a church.
We lunched at the Marquis Cornwallis around the corner from our hotel with N and S (and the baby) and a group of their friends. The fare included, and it seemed wrong not to have it, Sunday Roast. I opted for the Pork Belly which came with the first straight crackling I have ever seen. Everyone who had the pork, and there were a few of us, was not impressed. Our big gamble for the weekend was sending our laundry off. We used Laundryheap who collected our clothes from the hotel and then delivered them back to us, clean, the next day. That was the tricky part because if they had been Kate, we may have had to leave without them. I had read about this service on one of the various FaceBook groups I subscribed to as research for the trip. The posters had recommended taking a garbage bag for sending laundry off ... I had forgotten to bring one but the hotel came to the rescue. Our cleaned clothes came back in a lovely laundry bag which we will save for the rest of the trip. We'll be using them again because it's less than half the cost of having it done with a hotel laundry service. There is also the other option of a laundromat, depending on our tourist schedule and what's available near where we're staying.
