Today is moving day. One more time! Okay … two more times, but this is our last move within England. The apartment we booked for our time in London was only available until Nov 12. Our flight is Nov 14.

For the last two days we are booked into a hotel right underneath the landing planes of Heathrow. It will be impossible to sleep, I’m sure. However, I would rather make the arduous journey to the airport today when I am not worried about missing my flight, than on Monday morning. This is a trial run for getting ready to fly.

We’ve been here two weeks, so the suitcases are well and truly exploded all over. From Saturday night to Sunday morning, I do not imagine we will have the same amount of packing to do.

Crystal Palace is a delightful place. It is a quiet place to live, albeit still a busy, close-to-inner-London suburb. The area was named for a Victorian-era exhibition hall, which delighted people until a fire took its toll in the 1930s. Much of the town is still Victorian in its architecture, although modern buildings are found here and there.

It has been pleasant to stay here. The park was a beautiful place to spend a few hours in the afternoon. There is a hedge maze, though at this time of year it is truly a sad sight to behold. If it weren’’t for the chicken wire fences in between the rows, the empty bushes would just look like winter is coming. With the fences holding people in their rows, and the leaves fallen off the bushes, the effect is more one of decrepitude, rather than natural order.

The park also contains several dinosaur statues. Although life-size and designed by a scholar of natural history, today palaeontologists claim they are inaccurate, due to new research. I still think they are cool.

I’ll miss the park, and being able to get the best Indian food in London (in my humble opinion ; ) ). I won’t miss hiking up the hill to the highest point in all of greater London every night at the end of sightseeing, just to have to walk up three fights of stairs to get to our attic apartment.

In Orkney, Inverness, and in London, how did we always manage to find accommodations at the top of steep inclines? Well, I guess it keeps the heart pumping.

London’s Underground is undergoing massive construction work this month. Every possible line leaving Crystal Palace, and the only line to the airport are all being replaced by buses for portions of their journeys. The thought of dragging the suitcases up and down stairs to the trains, changing to a bus, back to a train, then a different train to a bus, then back to the train…umm, No thank you. Instead, we’ll take two buses. That’s all. It should take at least a couple hours to get across the city, but it will be easy.

We’ll have one more day out in London tomorrow. One more chance for blogging!