15Oct2008: Day 142: St. Paul's Cathedral & Wicked

Oh what a beautiful day. Whether wise, it was gray and rainy at times but it was a great day to get out with my husband of five years. Just him and I. We took the train down into London...again. Then took the Underground to St. Paul's Cathedral. Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside.

Wow, what a place! This is the fourth cathedral to St. Paul that's occupied the space it's in. The first one was in 604 AD. The one before this current one was destroyed by fire in the great fires of London. This one was built from 1675-1710, by Christopher Wren. He is buried at the cathedral but his tomb is very insignificant. His monument of greatness, so to say, is the church itself. There was one statue that was saved from the fire that's on display in the church. It had a broken handle and a little charring but it was amazing that this one out of all of them, survived. A lot of tombs and crypts were lost in the fire as they fell through the floors.

It's also held many celebrations of sorts and funerals of famous people, like Winston Churchill, and the marriage of Prince Charles & Lady Diana. They also held special services on Sept 11, 2001. It also had this section in the very back of the church dedicated to the Americans who lost their lives in World War II. What was most amazing though is the dome. We were able to walk up to different parts of the dome. The first part was really neat. It was called the Whispering Gallery. You could walk around it and if one person stands one one side and another person on another side, across from each other, you can hear someone whisper. So Chris walked over to the other side of the dome and I clearly heard him say "Teri, can you hear me." Unfortunately, he couldn't hear me. I'm not sure why. But you have a lot of people trying this out at once so you hear a lot of voices. Did I mention that it was 259 steps to get up to this point and it's a spiral staircase?

We foraged on and went up to the next section, The Stone Gallery. This is outside, but above the whispering gallery. It was another 117 spiraling steps to get to this section. On this section, you could walk around and see down into London. We were higher than the front of the church itself. It was windy and a bit rainy but it felt good as we were sweating from the first 200 plus steps.

Then up to the next level, again spiraling staircase, but with straight walkways in between to give you a break, of the 152 steps to go up to this last level which is again on the outside. It's called the Golden Gallery and runs around the highest point of the outer dome. It was actually quite dizzying to look up. Then it was back down all 530 steps and needless to say, our quads were quite sore! This picture to the left is from this top most level of the cathedral.

After getting back down, we walked more along the main floor and then went down into the crypt. We only had about 15 minutes or so down in the crypt as they were closing the cathedral for a special service. It worked out well for us anyways because we had to leave to grab the underground to get to the Apollo Victoria Theater for the play "Wicked". We grabbed food in the train station that was right there and then went over to the play. Our seats were actually pretty good. We were about 15 or so rows from the stage. The play was really good but at some points where they were singing, it was a bit hard to understand as it would get loud.

We got out about 5:15pm and walked around for a bit to see if there was some place to eat. We decided to take the train back home and grab dinner their. There is a restaurant that we've been wanting to try. The train we got out of Victoria station was a bit different from the usual trains. It was nicer, had tables between the seats and was so long that at different stations, pieces broke off and went different ways. So I got nervous that we might be in the wrong section to continue onto Gillingham and that it would break off and go another direction. But we asked someone who said we were fine. Then the train was running late as it was behind another late running train and they said over the loudspeaker that someone died at the Rochester Train station so we don't know what happened exactly.

We finally got home, and made it to the restaurant and had a nice peaceful meal. I really enjoyed taking the time to refresh and renew by having this wonderful day out and it was great to go home and see Makenna so excited to see us. We're grateful to Chris's parents for being willing to take this day to watch her for us. They did tell us that at one point, Makenna was sitting up on a chair and saw the bag of chips. She asked for chips and they said no as it was almost time for dinner. Makenna found a pence (penny) on the table, and dropped it on the floor. So when grandpa bent over to pick it up, she quickly grabbed the bag of chips. Almost two and finding ways to be sneaky....boy are we in trouble!