Got up nice and early and got ready for our trip to London. Turns out the bus is pretty much a commuter bus - we didn't get to sit together until quite close to the end of the trip. Not too bad a ride though, and I've realised that the law that says that passengers must wear seat belts on the bus is obeyed about as much as the law that limits the motorway speed limit to 70 miles per hour - ie, not much!
Anyway, we got to London and got a taxi to our hotel, the Thistle Marble Arch. We didn't get to pick this hotel - it's the start and finish hotel for all Insight tours from London. After reading the Tripadvisor reviews I was a bit concerned - it gets a broad range of reviews from poor to excellent, which often means that some of their rooms are very ordinary. However, they were happy to check us in early, and our room was quite good, apart from a malfunctioning toilet which we didn't report actually due to the drama of the rest of the day.
We checked in with the Insight Tours lady onsite, then went out to look around London. It was a beautiful day - we started by looking at Marble Arch then wandered past Hyde Park and down to Buckingham Palace. We then started walking around St James Park when disaster struck - I turned around to look at something, and I was standing right on the edge of a pathway. I twisted my ankle and immediately fell down.
I dragged myself over to a park bench and took stock of the damage - I've taken skin off both my hands and have huge scratches all over my left leg, but the worst is my ankle which immediately swelled up to around double its usual size. And, the worst thing is that with all the barriers up for the start of the Paralympics, there was no way to hail a taxi.
I was so impressed by the helpfulness and concern of other people - a nice French man rescued my glasses which had fallen off (and I doubt that I'd have noticed otherwise) and at least three other people stopped to ask if I was ok at various times. I wasn't really, but there wasn't anything they could do. I basically kept on staggering until we got to Whitehall, where Paul managed to hail a taxi and we went back to the hotel. The hotel people suggested either going to the hospital (but we'd have to find our own way there) or they could call in a private doctor. The private doctor was hellishly expensive, but I couldn't bear the thought of going out again, let alone going and waiting in a queue at a hospital - so, private doctor it was. He eventually came and prescribed some anti-inflammatories and antibiotics. Quite a good idea really, because I realised later that the scrapes and cuts are full of dirt from the fall.
Anyway, Insight organised a wheelchair in case I needed it; Paul managed to buy a pair of crutches for me in case I could manage that way, and I spent the night trying not to move too much. Not the way we wanted to start the trip.
Only one bit of (possibly) good news - I hadn't mentioned to this point but in the drama of our arrival in Cambridge, the remote control for Paul's hearing aids went missing. We were fairly sure it had fallen off in the storm and was floating down a river miles away, but we contacted the bus company on the off chance that it had fallen off in the bus. Good news - it had. Bad news - it's at their lost property office in Bedford, and we have absolutely no chance of getting back there without changing flights etc etc. I've asked them to send it to the hotel in London where we're staying again for a night at the end of the tour, but I haven't heard yet whether they'll agree to do this.
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