Free Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois by Gardner R. Dozois Page A

Palace before we can find an exit on the highway that lets us turn around in a tiny village called Wigham and get headed back in the right direction again. Finally do find the car rental place, which turns out to be quite some distance from town, so that we need an expensive cab ride back into Oxford, where we miss our train by seconds, forcing us to wait more than an hour for the next one. Then a hot ride into London, with our suitcases jammed into the aisle of the fortunately nearly empty train car, since they won’t fit in any of the available luggage-storage spaces. Then another cab ride, from Paddington Station to Euston.
    Find, to our relief, that there is an actual left-luggage department at Euston Station, and gladly pay the money to leave our luggage there. We are too limp and exhausted from all of this to want to do much, so we give up on our half-formed alternate plan to tour the Victoria and Albert Museum, and decide to take one of the city bus tours instead; at least we won’t have to walk to do that. Take a cab to Russell Square, where we know we can catch such a tour, and get there just a second or two after the bus pulls away. I find it oddly pleasing to be standing in front of the Russell Hotel again, and I decide that this feeling comes from the fact that, after a week of navigating mostly new and unfamiliar territory, here I know where everything is: the American Express office is just down the block, as is the newsstand where you can buy bottled water, the Night and Day, where you can get an ice-cream cone, the Italian place with the outdoor tables where you can get dessert, the little cafe near the British Museum where you can get a scone for breakfast, and so on. Somehow this makes it seem almost like stepping back into last week. (Later learn that George R.R. Martin was probably in the Russell while we were standing out in front of it, since he was staying there that day, but we had no way of knowing that at the time.)
    Catch a cab to Victoria, hoping to catch up with a tour bus there, but, near Trafalgar Square, we spot a London double-decker tour bus waiting by the curb, hop out of the cab, and board it—or rather, board one we’re directed to a few blocks away, in front of Charing Cross Station. Sit up on the top deck, of course, in the open air. The tour drives us by nothing we’re not already familiar with, but it’s a pleasant way to kill an hour and a half, and one that doesn’t involve walking or carrying huge suitcases. Susan becomes noticeably more relaxed and cheerful, now that she no longer has the responsibility of driving, which has clearly been weighing heavily on her. We pass the Statue of Eros (actually, the Spirit of Christian Charity, although no one will call it that) in Piccadilly Circus, where I’d once spent a night sitting on the fountain steps, decades ago, and although the fountain itself is the same (as are the hordes of shabbily romantic/Byronic kids sitting in romantic gloom on the steps), the surrounding Circus has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. Pass the grounds of Buckingham Palace, noticing the very heavy-duty and sincere barbed wire that tops the high surrounding walls and fences. Pass Green Park, which has been baked nearly brown by the sun.
    We get out across from Charing Cross, walk up to Covent Gardens, where the little streets in front of the pubs are completely blocked by loitering customers, foaming pints in hand; later, we peek into the end of Leicester Square, and that’s so crowded that the tourists are literally standing packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, as though they are at some kind of political rally or free rock concert—but they’re just taking in the night. I don’t recall London being quite this jammed with tourists twenty-five years ago, and I wonder if the tourist density level is this high every year now . . . or is this just another effect of the unusually hot and dry and prolonged (and very un-English) summer weather?