It's official:  London today was hotter than Cancun.  And we were there.  It was a beautiful day all day long, but, remember that part about the heat?  Noticeable.  Still, we had another good day in London, and here are a few highlights.
     We started at the Tower of London, a place that I had not visited since 1974.  After today, I think that once every 42 years is plenty.  It's like the London Eye, only older.  Actually, that's not entirely fair.  I told John C. that I would have enjoyed visiting the Tower if I had not entered any buildings.  The complex itself is quite stirring to see, but once you start inside the White Tower or the queue for the Crown Jewels, you're trapped.  You're on a course there's no escaping and must see it through to the end of the sinuous, shuffling line.

     From the Tower we schlepped over to the British Museum, which we all enjoyed much more than the Tower.  Why?  Because, in the words of my fellow travelers, the British Museum is more legit.  The masterpieces in the museum are breathtakingly real, and we all got a charge out of wandering among them, starting with the Rosetta Stone:

Below: two works of art.  Can you tell which is the statue?

I ran into Charles and Jack in the gallery that once held literary autographs before the British Library moved out of the museum and up to Euston Road:

Below, left to right: John C., Robert Boyle (I think), Jack, Charles.

     From the Museum we walked over to Doughty Street and the Dickens House Museum.  Along the way we posed in front of the gate of a place that should be on the short list for every Woodberry senior applying to postsecondary educational institutions.  I hope you can make out the name in metal letters across the middle of the vertical bars:  GOODENOUGH COLLEGE.

The informative and relatively modest Dickens House offered a nice respite from the more grandiose places we had visited earlier in the day.  Michael was sitting in a chair made available to guests; please don't think that we just plopped down in the 19th Century furniture:

In case you're wondering, half of the group left the British Museum a bit earlier than we did.  They and John C. went to the Dickens House and then came back to Oxford in time for dinner.  The rest of us stayed in London a bit longer, took the tube to Harrods, and had dinner at a creperie near the South Kensington tube station.  We got back to Oxford around 9:00 p.m.