Oh gentle reader, we’re nearing the end now. I know it’s been a hard going series of blog posts,but trust me, doing it was harder than reading about it. When we finished part 3 we were boarding the Bakerloo Line in Elephant & Castle. Join us now as we emerge in Marylebone to bag another station.
Now, Fenchurch Street may be down the scale of London stations but Marylebone is smaller still – in the busyness scale, it sits one below Fenchurch and it hasn’t even given its name to Hitchhiker’s character. That’s probably why I’ve never been there before, and why we spent less than six minutes there, all told. At 15:51, the kids were posing by the tube sign:
but by 15:57 we were upstairs, across the concourse and out:
There wasn’t much reason to linger, although it was quite pretty as Central London stations go. So we hopped on the 205 bus to Euston to get our first light blue. But before we got a photo of the road itself, we had a park to explore. After the disappointment of the Old Kent Road, it was lucky we had another playground planned. In fact, I had “gardens” as the theme of the light blue set but that went out of the window pretty quickly. We did manage this one, though. St James’ Garden just behind the station:
Google Maps had failed to definitively tell me whether there was a playground there or not. So I’m happy to clear that up for you all – yes, there was. It looks like this:
It’s not huge but I imagine if you’re killing time before your train to Manchester, it would be a handy thing to know about. I could have done with it on the CBeebies panto day. Eva yuved it so much she wanted to yive there. This is her house:
And she and Reuben have their own double car for getting about:
Unfortunately, they seemed to have a weird ban on playing Monopoly in this playground. Eek! How did they know that’s what we were doing? Look, here it is – no scotty dogs:
I expect they’ve banned top hats as well. Bah Moneybags!
While we were there, Roo wanted to play with a hoopla set he’d got from a nice American lady just off the Strand two days before. There was some friction between him and Eva, which naturally occurs with any game the two of them play. Then there was some friction between his hoopla ring and my face, which is another natural occurrence but didn’t put me in the best mood. We also needed to find some toilets pretty quickly, so we marched off in the direction of the Wellcome Collection and Friends House, hoping one of them was still open at 5ish. Points go to Wellcome, once again.
And look, we were on Euston Road proper!
At this point, I only knew one thing – that we had three stops to go and we were going to do them, no matter how whiny anyone got. My thought was we’d walk to Kings Cross, have a coffee there and then push on to Islington. I had a mind to check out Drink, Shop and Do as we’ve failed to go there quite a few times now. This would be another fail.
We made it to Kings Cross – yes! But then there was much in the way of dithering. While we linger on the Caledonian Road crossing, I’ll tell you a bit of information that has been thus far missing – what we did at the stations. This was Roo’s idea, but I supported it – a mini-quiz about each station. I’ve been training him to be a tube geek all his life but it’s really accelerated this summer and he’s been planning our journey every time we’ve gone out. Some of his suggestions are wacky (home from Stratford via Liverpool Street) but hey, he’s learning.
So I gave him 4 mini quizzes about each station. Can you name all the lines that go through Kings Cross? Or know where the closest underground to Fenchurch Street is? Roo does. And could you tell us whether we were having dinner out or at home? Because we really were dithering for this long. Along the way, we got our Pentonville Road photo though:
Classy.
We finally decided – we would skip coffee, and the Pentonville Road park (Joseph Grimaldi Park if you’re interested) and catch a bus on up to the Angel. Are you sensing a lack of enthusiasm in these later photos? Well, I was too and that’s why we decided once and for all to dine at the Angel. A bit of peri-peri spice would perk us up enough to get home, right?
First though, we needed to take care of one last bit of business. We had crossed the finish line and we needed a photo to prove it:
Now, where were those grumpy children I was keeping around the place?
There they are! It’s a measure of how tired and hungry we all were by this point that I had a great idea but didn’t even have the energy to pursue it. We didn’t plan to do the utilities, but after the spontaneous water play in part two made a kind of child-friendly waterworks, it seemed fitting to look for something to act as the electricity company. Nathan rejected my plan for spontaneous electricity play but as we trooped through Angel, it suddenly struck me that we were in the vicinity of the legendary club Electrowerkz! Of course, it wouldn’t be open but if we just went and posed outside it we could….no….too tired….give me chicken….now.
And that slightly pathetic note is the end of our Monopoly quest. Congratulations if you made it through all four posts – there will be one more, with a simplified version of our route but thank you if you’ve read even some if it. It was indeed epic. Happy 500th LWAT!
