On the next day (a Sunday) we spent a good part of the day in a different part of London.
We took the Underground from nearby Victoria Station (we were able to use our same passes
from a few years before) over to the area near St. Paul's Cathedral with a more unusual
visit to the Mithraeum. The worship of the god Mithras apparently began in the mid-East
and became a major worship particularly among Roman soldiers, and it did involve the
ritual sacrifice of a bull. In England, it was widely embraced by Roman soldiers from
1 CE until about 5 CE. In 1954, work excavating war damage uncovered this temple about
7 meters down. It was reconstructed and more recently moved to the current site very
close to its original location. The museum also has artifacts uncovered, and the glass
works hanging in the lobby are meant to invoke some of those artifacts. As one walks under
the art, there is a sound similar to the sound of the ocean in a seashell. From here we
took a long walk, first over to St. Paul's, over the Thames on the Millenium Bridge, along
the South Walk near the Globe Theater and walking by the new Tate, and back across the
Blackfriar’s Bridge where we took the Underground back to Victoria Station. We didn't do
much the next day, just relaxed and got all our stuff in order for the trip back to DC.
Then the next day (a Tuesday) we headed to Heathrow to take our flight back to DC. We
arrived in the late afternoon/early evening. We realized at Dulles how much we disliked
the "mobile lounges". It took them awhle to dock the plane and then we finally got off
but were directed into a "loading" room where we stood around for considerably over a
half hour waiting for a mobile lounge to show up to take a good while to move us to the
main terminal. Finally we got there, probably at least an hour after the flight landed.
But we were very happy when our Global Entry allowed us to sail through immigration. Then
we looked for our bags on the moving luggage claim belt only to find out a little later
that they had been taken off and put a little further away because it took us so long to
get there. But we did get home, got some food, cooked a nice dinner and went to bed at
about 2am London time but got up about 8am DC time.
One other comment: A remarkable thing was the weather on this trip. We had a
thunderstorm in Miami, some drizzle one day in the middle of the Atlantic, and a
very brief thunderstorm on our last day in London. Otherwise we had bright sunny days
with no rain and with generally good temperatures.
(Click on a picture to see it larger. Opens in a new folder.)
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