Hey Deutschland.

There are a lot of heroes in this story.  The main one from today is Debbie.  But I'll get to that.

Maybe I'm in a heroic mood because we went to the Cabinet War Rooms museum, underneath some government building near Parliament where Churchill set up his emergency offices in World War Two and where a lot of the war got planned.  It felt like it was inside a ship, and indeed it was designed by this guy, Ismay, who had a Royal Marine background.  Even though it was underground, it wasn't built like a bunker, it was this improvised space, and they reinforced it as much as they could but it was never really safe and would have caved in in the event of a direct bomb hit, although Churchill never told most of the staff that.  There were these huge gorgeous map rooms.  And there was a guy, this thriller novelist of the day, employed as a Deception Specialist, whose job it was to cook up ways to fake out the Germans.  Great job.  Also, Churchill despised paper clips and staples so he had all his documents hole-punched and then . . . tied together? I missed that word on the audio tour.  But he definitely had all his documents hole-punched.Churchill liked to eat Beef Wellingtons.  What is a Beef Wellington?

I didn't take a bunch of pictures today.  The War Rooms were poorly lit, and Westminster Abbey didn't allow photos inside.

AH!  Westminster Abbey.  I can't even tell you.  I can't even tell you.  I can not even tell you.  Poet's corner.  It's this very old, very beautiful, very living place.  With Browning and Tennyson and Johnson and Newton and the inventor of the pianoforte in it.  And lovely gardens.

We ate fish and chips in a pub.

And there's Buckingham Palace.  That's as close as we got to it.

I don't mean for this to just be a log of the places we went.  I want to tell stories, hopefully interesting ones.  But the days are so packed that our time is limited and this is what's easiest.  I apologize for that.  I'll try to be thinking more about stories and less about places or things.

Buckingham palace seemed less interesting to us than catching our train on time, which we started doing right after we bought another round of whippys (my ice cream fell off the cone and I CAUGHT IT and ate it) and a pasty.  We went back to the hostel and got our luggage, got back on the tube, and rode out to the National Rail station.  We barely missed the Stansted Express from Tottenham Hale tube station to the airport, so we had to wait another fifteen minutes for the next one.  Then once we got there, RyanAir charged us an exorbitant fee for airport check in, and the self-service kiosks wouldn't take my card, and there were long lines, and one desk referred us to the other desk.  Finally we got it all paid for (grumble) and went through security, where the lady who weighed my bag told me it was overweight and would be charged a fee.  So I was putting clothes on my body and cramming stuff into my pockets, and we were all hoping our bags would fit into the overhead compartments because we were checking none, and meantime our flight is boarding . . . so we sprinted, heavy-laden, from security to the gate, which seemed so far away, and made it on time.  I know you've heard that story in every romantic comedy you've ever seen involving an airport, but, well, our life is a movie.

The plane took us to GERMANY, specifically Karlsruhe-Baden airport, where Debbie met us and started driving us around, helping us learn how to pronounce German, pointing out to us the downtown of Baden-Baden which is a spa getaway for the rich and famous, introducing us to her car's GPS who we named Charles, and showing us how to drive 100 (MPH, not kph) on the Autobahn.  Totally legal.  We were trying to get to the US Army base nearby to stay the night, but the gate we arrived at was locked.  After slogging through some unhelpful directions from Charles and some even less helpful directions from the Military Policeman on the other side of the chain link fence, we drove through some asparagus (spargel) fields around the base until the German polizei tracked us down to ask us what the heck we were doing.  (In five hundred yards, turn right.  Thanks Charles.)  Debbie convinced them to lead us to the entrance to the base, which they did begrudgingly, and we're now in by far the poshest lodgings we've seen yet, thanks to Debbie.

Guys, I forgot to put the quote of the day yesterday, so I'll put it here.

"Your call has been accepted.  The lift will be here shortly."

--Elevator in St. Pancras International Train Station, to Nate

Also forgot to mention that a Jamaican lady in Brixton explained to me that breadfruit would put hair on my chest.  Apparently she thought I needed help with that.

All right.  More from Deutschland tomorrow.  Love.

-W.

--Gumshoes:  Tomorrow we're going to one of the oldest Universities in the world, officially called the Ruprecht Karls University.  Also, they discovered the jawbone of the earliest human skeleton found in Europe in this town.