We left the Travelodge around noon. The plan was to store my bags at Heathrow (there's a luggage storage place that sideeyed me about my many electronic devices, but took them no problem in the end), go to town, come back before the coach arrived (which is just a bus with space underneath it for suitcases, if you didn't know like I didn't), retrieve my bags, and take the three hour trip back to Cardiff.
Caby's parents told her all about the wonders of The Whale—which my sheltered ass didn't even recognize as a whale at first.
The destination? The Museum of Natural History, which Caby's dad recommended. Entry's free, so you have no reason not to go. I would've liked to visit more of the museums in that part of town, but London still exists. Next time. (This will sound astoundingly autistic, but I was also fixed by and kinda in love with the big network of underground tunnels we walked through that day—as a level design hobbyist at heart, I could only imagine the crazy monster encounters you could build into those tight spaces.)
We got a full taste of everything the London Underground had to offer that day. Going back to Heathrow in the morning (on the Piccadilly Line!), we were the only ones in the car. Going back to Heathrow at night? We were struggling to find standing room, and somehow getting pushed further into the car with every departure. That said, I wish we had trains like that in the US, especially where I live. I'd go into town way more.
I was thoroughly impressed at how clean and efficient the Tube was compared to NYC's subways.
The museum ruled. Dinosaurs, birds, human evolution, and earth science were the orders of the day, and then we got to look at plushies afterwards. Let's go through what I've got good for each one. (Again, this is just a scant few of the photos I took—the rest of them, you can see in the photo galleries up on cabycammy.somnolescent.net!)
Dinos! (and the dino-like)
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Archaeopteryx! An old bird with sharp teeth. This picture came out so moody, I love it. I was apparently going to file this boy in with the birds later on, but he was in the dinosaur exhibit, so he goes here. |
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This is one of the dinosaurs you see right as you go up the stairs at the front. It's not my boy Triceratops, sadly, but still a classic, Stegosaurus. Apparently they were really stupid. Me too gamer. |
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Bradysaurus baini, which weighed half a ton and is not a dinosaur, actually, but an early reptile called a pareiasaur. According to Wikipedia, their main predators were the gorgonopsians, which is just a badass name. Someone please name a race of space lizards that. Anyway, this one was found in South Africa. |
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I was so annoyed that I couldn't remember the name of this guy, despite Caby and I passing him several times during the trip, but she's since informed me this boy is a moa! Extinct New Zealand-based relative of the ostrich. Smart girl... This was a fun photo to get because the DSi has a very short field of view, so I had to back up a lot (and thus be in people's way) to get it all in shot. |
Early humans!
I find early humans weirdly unsettling, if I'm honest. Uncanny valley, plasticine recreations of what their heads looked like, but dammit, we went in anyway to find a whole lot of short boys.
| This was right outside the exhibit. It was a big wall of skulls with lines indicating the family tree of modern humans. I wanted to get close in on a few because otherwise you wouldn't be able to make out any of it, but it was hilarious seeing all these real specimen skulls and then like a Party City human skull right at the bottom. Makes sense why, but still. |  |
| I'm guessing my weirdness about these guys is because whenever I see a CG recreation of a head based on a skull, I think of all those forensics shows I caught late at night as a kid where they found a body so badly decomposed back in the 70s, it couldn't be identified, and modern CG gets used to maybe figure out what the person looked like. Fuckin' spooky. |  |
| I think we took a picture of this one because we were amused at how many bones he was missing. I was more interested in getting to the rest of the museum. |  |
| Seriously, these boys were so short. I'm very glad we don't look like this. (Although maybe if we did, my brain would be okay with it because I'd be used to seeing it.) Anyway, Caby wants me to note that one of these skeletons was probably a chimp. We were too busy looking at the cool lizards to notice. |  |
Rocks!
I got the most photos of rocks. I'll just let you peruse them in a big grid... Sidenote, you know you're marrying someone when you can get excited about rocks together. (If you wanna know what I saw, from first to last, stibnite, pyrite, smithsonite, and then wulfenite is the orange-gold one in the middle pic. I wasn't able to identify the one next to it using my app, and we didn't wander through the mineral lab again so I could note down what all the rocks were. If you know what it is, lemme know!)
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Birds!
I guess it's because of how similar they are to dinosaurs, but there was a surprisingly long hallway devoted entirely to birds. Extinct birds, exotic birds, common birds, you name it. (I'd make some kinda joke about Cockfosters, but my brain is mush putting this together.)
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Eventually, though, it was time to head home. The coach was like 5-10 minutes late, which stressed Caby out to no end, but I just found it amusing. It did show up, though, we showed 'em our tickets, the driver put my suitcase in the big compartment under the bus, and we were off. The trip was long, it made a few stops, and I was very happy to see Welsh start appearing on all the signs halfway through.
Caby's dad and Cramble retrieved us from the coach park in Cardiff. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, meeting her parents, but it was a pretty big relief when I did. The funny thing about Caby's family is that they all have pretty similar personalities, and they all fixate the same way and they're all big saps and worriers. (Case in point, while her mom trusted our judgment, she did warn Caby to watch out for any "serial killer vibes" on my part. We'd joke about this pretty much daily over the trip, and her mom got a giggle in with us later on.)
But yeah, I get along well with her, I get along well with them—and her parents, her siblings, her and I would all go on to have many long, winding conversations about just about everything together. I was part of the family now. We piled into their (sadly now-defunct) Kia Sedona to pick up their mom and head on home.