Charing Cross Road

Today, we got up almost at the crack of noon, having decided we deserved a good "lie-in" after yesterday's jaunt! And we decided to finish yesterday's walk. Of course, if that were all we'd done, we'd have taken two tubes to spend 15 minutes walking up the street from Charing Cross Station to Leicester Square station, so we did do a couple of detours on the way!

For one, we started at Leicester Square and did our usual fifteen minutes just getting our bearings. Trying to find your way around is maddening if you don't know the system (and half the time if you do, I suspect). We pop out of the tube stations with our written Walk instructions in hand and it will say turn right on such and such a street, and there will be 5 or 6 streets coming together in one intersection, and no street signs in sight! Finally, we've discovered that most of the street signs are on the sides of buildings on the corners - but many are left unmarked. So we usually wander a bit at the beginning of each walk. Our little maps with the walks don't show all the streets, and those street signs we can find usually don't show on the maps, so for a bit we keep heading this way and that and then retrace our steps! We're definitely getting our exercise here!

Finally, we found ourselves starting where we'd left off and wandered down St. Martin's Lane and rounding a corner to find The Mousetrap still playing (54 years, I believe it is) in the St. Martin Theatre. Our guidebook asked us to find out if they've done performance number 25,000 yet, but it's only 22, 495 tonight!  We saw this years ago on our first trip to London - it's the one thing we did do. I loved it, as it's really theatre as it used to be, I think, and I loved the fact that at the end, you are sworn to secrecy about the ending. The only way they can go on playing is if people don't know "whodunnit", and one of the actors steps forward at the curtain call to say that you are now "in the club", and that you musn't let on. I actually cried when he said that - I get sentimental at the oddest things. 

Then we took a short walk down Charing Cross Road - for fans of the book "84 Charing Cross Road", I've found the coolest website: http://www.84charingcrossroad.co.uk/

We looked for the number, but couldn't find any store listed with that address. We think it's the Pizza Hut on the corner, though. 

We did pass several "antiquarian bookstores", several in business since the 1800's, though, and assume Marks and Co. was similar to those. We stopped in at the mystery store "Murder One" at 76-78 Charing Cross Road, though, and bought a couple of books just to say we did!

 

We have found that every restaurant and cafe (some even without seating) offers afternoon tea, (scroll down) so we hopped in to Brown's Restaurant and had afternoon tea - very nice - got to love the clotted cream (I expect if it weren't for all the walking, my arteries would be made up entirely of clotted cream by now!). To me, this makes a nice lunch, and the fact that most places don't start serving it til 2 is not a problem, as that's about when we're ready to sit down or fall down!

After tea today, we hied on home again - giggling about having had cucumber sandwiches for Thanksgiving Dinner! We will likely go out to one of the local spots around here for dinner, and may see if we can get a roast and yorkshire pudding! If not, a steak and kidney pie will do me fine!

Tomorrow we head out of town again to Oxford and on to Sulgrave Manor - can't wait to see it.