Chilterns and Baker Street

This past weekend involved dancers forests and murder mysteries.

I went down to my Aunt and Uncles place on Friday night - they live in Maidenhead, just outside London, right where it becomes the countryside. Lovely area.  On Saturday we went on a long country drive to a number of little towns like High Wycombe, Amersham, Chesham etc, and drove through the Chilterns... I've always wanted to go for a drive in the Chilterns (a forest) because when I was small my favourite heroine from the ballet books I loved often went into the Chilterns and it sounded like a magical place. It was very nice and I can see how the author would have fallen in love back in the 1940's.

Saturday night I met up with Tamsin, my boss and friend who lives fairly close to me in London. We went for dinner and then had some drinks at a couple pubs along Northcott Road in Clapham. Apparently it is a 'thing to do', but honestly it wasn't that different than any other areas of the city... LOL!

Sunday I used for tourism. First I went to The Monument, which was built in the 1670's as tribute to the Great Fire of London 1666. Basically it's a giant column which you climb for views of the city. Pretty nice views actually, so worth it.

Then I went to the Charles Dickens Museum, onsite at his London home on Doughty Street in Holborn. This is apparently where he wrote his first big hit (something about Pickwick), and then Nicolas Nickleby. Very cool to go, but as with most places in London, enough other people went through the house that nothing is left from Dicken's day.

After that I did some browsing on Oxford Street, and then went up to 211b Baker Street.  Anyone know what that is?  It's the address and office of Sherlock Holmes!! It is actually really cool, they've totally 'run' with the stories and ideas, and have really loaded up the Victorian home full of artifacts from the era. So cool! Definitely worth a visit.

This week will see me spending a lot of time working late, but not on work.. have to do a bunch of applications to Canadian law schools for my conversion. yup. University of Orkney will be back up and running in an academic capacity in the next few months. wooooo.

Anyway.  To distract myself from that impending doom (oooh melodrama!!), Kathryn and I are off on a rather massive adventure this weekend - going to Denmark!!! We've bought tickets to Copenhagen and are planning all sorts of trouble! Well, actually, Kat is the one planning the trouble, I'm just along for the ride. She knows quite a bit about the city from others in her life, and is setting up what feels to be an hour by hour itinerary for the trip! quite fun actually! We fly Friday night and return Sunday night. I'll report in next week about what we got up too!! :)