England – arrival and Egham – Apr 3

[see Miranda's post from January of her original exploration of the town and campus for more details]

so, the flight over I only slept the littlest bit. maybe 2 hours total. total. that’s overnight. so, that combined with the time change made it “i have no idea o’clock” when the plane landed.

They tell me it was about 10a-ish.

Miranda and I had planned on meeting at a coffee shop at Terminal 5 – which I think is the MAIN terminal of the place …

Heathrow airport is gi-normous. One of the major major international airports of the world, I’d guess.

You have to take a train/subway between terminals…. so I had my rolling suitcase (thank you, Angela! it was perfect) and my over-full, heavy heavy heavy backpack …. wandering around Heathrow.

I went the wrong way, at first. Too many people for me to stop and look around for signs, etc … so I just picked a direction.

so, that was fun.

Finally figured out where I need to go to get to Terminal 5 … and I ‘hopped’ onto the train – as much as I could hop on 2 hours of sleep with all my stuff.

see this (below)? … yea … I landed at terminal 4 … so that’s telling me that not only do I have to get on a train to go to another terminal, but I have to actually switch trains. …. a 4 minute ride to one stop. Get out with all my stuff, walk across the place to another platform and get on a train going the opposite way.

Brilliant bit of planning there.

I finally found Miranda … I’m sure I looked like hell.

Oh well. …

And we went and found the bus we needed to get back to her school.

She’s only about 20 min away from Heathrow by bus … really really convenient.

Once we got to her campus, we pretty much just went straight to her dorm.

The original plan was for me to take a shower, we could maybe get something to eat, then go to Windsor Castle for the afternoon. It took the last entry at 4p so we had plenty of time …

Now I think is a good time to remind you that Miranda lives in a dorm. … with 2 showers for her whole corridor (40 girls?) … and one of them has no light so it’s like closing yourself in a coffin when you take a shower.

Awesome.

Kind of like camping.

Anyway, I took a shower which woke me up a little bit, went back to her room to finish getting ready (brushed my teeth, etc) while Miranda was online. I was totally ready. Definitely awake enough to last for the next few hours.. .. even though I had been awake for … nearly 24 hours at that point.

I decided to check my email (it had been awhile) … sat down on the bed … and every last ounce of energy I thought I had just left.

So, after some discussion. … . I took a nap. A nice 2 hour nap that revived me enough for the rest of the night.

We spent Friday night just in Egham – the first example of a change in my itinerary.

Since a lot of the shops/etc close around 5p, once I had woken up from my nap, we took a walk down into Egham for dinner.

Royal Holloway is the college, and it’s kind of situated on a hill outside of Egham. In order to get to Egham’s High Street, or the train station or anything … we had to walk through residentials …

Most of the houses/streets looked like this:

At dinner:

We went to an Italian restaurant. I ordered something boring because I was being cheap. Instead of just enjoying England and not worrying about spending an extra $5….. bad idea.

After dinner, we went to the grocery store for a couple things (like bananas for breakfast the rest of the weekend) and walked back up to Royal Holloway….

To get back up to Miranda’s dorm (building pictured below), we had to walk through the residential area, then through another part of campus (other dorms maybe?) and through a park-like area …. where sometimes we saw rabbits hopping down the trail.

true story.

Miranda’s dorm. The Founder’s building. This building used to be the whole of the university … back late 19th century when it was founded.

daffodils EVERYWHERE …. I kind of felt like I had never seen daffodils in real life before this …

Miranda’s hallway:

She was on the 3rd floor (I think) …
… and this is an old building.
Wide hallways, high ceilings, teeny tiny bathrooms…. doors between corridors, old handles/hardware…. radiators every few feet….
And because she is on spring break, there were only 3 or so girls on her floor… We pretty much saw no one else. ….

Each time I walked down the hallway by myself to the bathroom … this is what I saw…

and each time it reminded me of The Shining ….
(lucky for miranda she hasn’t seen it yet)

I kind of wish I had a tricycle to ride around …

One thing we did Friday night was tour around campus a little bit.

Because it is such an old school, Royal Holloway has some real historic little corners…

The library was closed. … too bad. I love books.

We went first to the chapel.
It was relatively small … but lovely. REALLY high ceilings…. AND there was someone practicing the organ when we walked in … that was particularly gorgeous. When I’m in a church like that I really feel like there should be organ music .
..

Then we went to the Picture Gallery …. Miranda stuck her head in one end, but it looked like there was a conference or similar going on so we didn’t go in.

Instead, we went around to the other side because there was some neat paintings in the hallway leading up to the Picture Gallery …

As we were prowling around outside the actual gallery, a woman came out and almost walked right past us – turns out it was one of Miranda’s teachers who let us ‘sneak in’ to see the gallery while the conference (Victorian studies, I think) had their cocktail hour before dinner.

And then she told us all the best paintings are on tour in the United States.

Oh well.

The ones remaining were still fantastic.

My favorite was looking at the images and dates of all the portraits of principals. Royal Holloway used to be part Bedford College – an all women’s university. So all the portraits of the principals are women.

It’s interesting that the women who were principals only 10 years were all principals when they were young and attractive …. and the women who were principals 30 years are all old and masculine and unmarried.

Coincidence? doubtful.

My favorite was the principal who had been in charge 1931-1955 (I think)…. she’s this thin, frail looking older woman, with so much stress and exhaustion in her eyes, resting her head on her hand as she sits in a chair….. … and this is her official portrait! I could just imagine how trying it must have been to be principal of a university just outside London during WW2/The Blitz…..

Amazing.

The rest of the night we just relaxed a bit, emails, etc …. At Miranda’s suggestion I took a tylenol PM before I went to bed. Slept like a log. … and woke up about 7a Saturday morning with no hint of jet lag.