London Day One

Virgin Atlantic Flight 12 left Boston Logan Airport at 7:45 p.m. on Friday, 25 September 2009 with Jim and me in seats 60J and 60K. We've taken our empty nest on the road. The flight was just under 7 hours, arriving around 8 a.m. London time. With our Oyster cards in hand(30 pds each for 7 days, unlimited Tube and bus rides), we took the Picadilly Line to the Circle Line and left our luggage at the hotel: Abbey Court near Paddington Station. We stayed here in July 2001 with our six children, then ages 10-20. The room is cozy, with a large sycamore tree outside our huge window.
I purposely didn't bring a camera. Mine's kinda clunky and doesn't take action shots. So, I'll just buy postcards along the way. For you blog followers, you'll have to use your imagination.
We toured King's Cross Station. A sign informed us that they'd moved Platform 9 3/4 due to renovation and directed us to its temporary location. When we visited in 2001, there was no brick wall between Platform 9 and Platform 10, so I wonder if this is a recent addition...It has the end of a luggage trolley bolted to the wall, so it looks like the trolley is entering Platform 9 3/4.
St. Pancras Station has a beautiful "glass-and-iron train shed, which for many years had the largest clear-span in the world." (TimeOut London, 2009 edition) Next to the station is the British Library, not to be confused with the British Museum, which housed the British Library until 1997.
A Parliamentary committee called the 1997 British Library "one of the ugliest buildings in the world" (ibid). Inside it the dimly lit John Ritblat Gallery houses an amazing collection of books and manuscripts, including Handel's hand-written Messiah score, a huge Gutenburg Bible, which was illumined by hand, a teenage journal of Jane Austen, a dictionary that Samuel Johnson created and two of the four existing copies of the Magna Carta. I was especially anxious to see those having heard that a copy of the Magna Carta has travelled to Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan. Samuel Johnson is one of Jim's favorites. He's been re-reading his biography by Boswell lately.
We bought some sandwiches and have settled in our rooms, trying desparately not to fall asleep, in order to acclimate quickly to the 5 hour time difference. Tonight it's Verdi's Requiem at the Barbican Centre. Hopefully that will be forte enough to keep us awake.