Grand Finale

Monday, October 25, 2010

Today’s plan called for a visit to the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House and then a wander around to see a few things we’d missed on this trip.

En route the Courtauld, we walked through London’s small Chinatown, through Leicester Square’s entertainment center, and spent a little time browsing though the Monday antiques market at Covent Garden.

We thoroughly enjoyed touring the collection at the Courtauld, a real treasure trove of Impressionists and post-Impressionists, as well as a wealth of Rubens.  This is a small jewel of a museum, whose collection is largely the result of the gifts of several private collections, and whose galleries’ architecture and decoration provide a worthy setting for the works on display.

We lunched along the Thames in Victoria Tower Gardens, in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, and in the company of Rodin’s sculpture group, The Burghers of Calais.  

In search of yet another angle for photos of Parliament, we crossed the river on the Lambeth Bridge and walked along the Albert Embankment before crossing back via the Vauxhall Bridge.  We were really off the beaten path and, though the areas were densely packed with office and apartment towers, the crowds of central London were nowhere evident.  We walked all afternoon, through quiet and quite lovely residential and commercial neighborhoods of Pimlico, Chelsea, South Kensington, Kensington, and Notting Hill before calling it a day.

This was another clear and beautiful fall day and also quite warm.  The forecast calls for chilly, wet, and windy weather beginning tomorrow, so it’s probably time for us to head for the Valley of the Sun.  It’s been a great month, but our bags are packed and we’re ready to get back to the real world which, after all, is a pretty sweet one.