After I had run through my three boxes of archives it was time to rendezvous with my super amazing wife, who had entertained herself rather than watch me go through boxes of old records. Lunch under our belt we detoured to things more squarely in her realm of interests, in this case tea and Shakespeare. After a brief stop at Twinings tea where she took advantage of their 3-for-2 deal, we head for the first time across the Thames to south London to make the pilgrimage to Shakespeare’s Globe.

This was not actually my first visit to the Globe. Back in middle school my family did a house exchange in Scotland, except dad figured out that it was cheaper to book a package deal with a week in London than to just book the airline tickets by themselves, so this whole trip was over my old stomping grounds. I don’t think having viewed these places as a preteen and then as a 30-something provides any particular insights. My biggest surprise upon revisiting the Globe was that although I knew it was a recreation (albeit on a somewhat smaller scale), I didn’t realize it had been built only in 1997, so when I visited it last it was like, new. Though my biggest memory was that they did not have any lapel pins in the gift shop back then, so I had to go with a pin-back button, the kind of move I would mostly refuse to make these days, because the other difference between me as a 30-something and me as a preteen is that now I have standards by golly.

On this visit to the Globe we took the guided walking tour, which was very good. It started off in their little museum there in the basement. It is pretty good and especially with the guide it gives you a good grounding in why the theater was where it was and what sorts of entertainments they were putting on and how. The big competition around there for eyeballs was bear-baiting which is just like, those poor bears and those poor dogs. But after the museum we went out into South London to let the guide paint for us the Elizabethan world on the backdrop of the modern world. Besides pointing out where all the bear-baiting was happening (one of the spots is like a nice-looking seafood place now, history is wild), you also got to learn about ferrymen, and the local brewspots that were there were breweries for centuries and centuries. They also showed you the original spot where the Globe was, except they can’t do much archeology on it because a large chunk of the spot is covered with a newer building, but not a “new” building because that building is also historical and they can’t modify it or take it down at all to take a look at the Globe. Man must be wild to be a country with so many layers of the sort of history that leaves brick walls, specifically.

The tour ended at the gift shop, where I was distressed to learn that although they now have lapel pins, none of them said “Globe Theater” (I try to ensure my lapel pins say the name of the place I got them from), so I had to go with a cat holding a skull instead. You all will have to remind me where it is from. But with that bit of Elizabethan atmosphere absorbed, we head back across the river. There we took in some of our last sights of London, including fun things like Roman wharf timber and remaining bits of the Old London Bridge (conveniently both are in the same spot). It was important to absorb these things because the next morning we were off to the next big city of our vacation. So we tubed back to the hotel, had a good night’s sleep, woke up early, schlepped our too big suitcases through a couple of Tube stations not designed for too-big-suitcase-schlepping, and eventually arriving at Paddington. I had time to grab a sausage roll before we caught our train, which was a very nice ride. I was stunned to see we were going at over 110 miles per hour, but I suppose that sort of thing was just normal around there. But all the better because we were excited to finally arrive in the city of Jane Austen’s dreams: Bath.