Our last day with friends. After breakfast we took care of our final packing and prepared to depart. Carol and Shaun graciously offered to drive us to our hotel at Heathrow. Very nice.
After the drive to London we spent the day in Kew, home of the Royal Botanical Gardens and a short drive later to the airport. Kew Gardens (as they are known) is a World Heritage site and houses the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world. Shaun used a new phone app to snag a parking space in a private garage across from the garden entry and a few blocks from where we later dined.
The gardens are incredible and it was a fun spend the day exploring. Shaun and Dick got overhead views climbing to the top of the incredible Palm House and later on the ‘Treetop Walkway’. The Palm House is massive. It was built in the 1840’s and was the first large scale use of wrought iron for construction. The structure’s glass panes are all hand blown. The nearby Temperance House is twice as large as the Palm House. It is the largest Victorian glasshouse in existence. After viewing the ‘Welcome to Mexico’ exhibit at the Temperance House we enjoyed a nice midday ‘tea’ session then finished up at the other end of the park.
One exhibit stands out in my mind and that is the ‘The Hive’, a multi-sensory experience designed to highlight the life of bees. It was originally created for the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo and is now a permanent fixture in the Kew Gardens. Built in the shape of a honeycomb, the exhibit is set in a wildflower meadow. The technology behind the light and sound experience is great: Bees communicate by vibrating messages to the colony. At Kew, honeybee vibrations are recorded. 1,000 LED light pulses and the pace of orchestral music are driven by the changing intensity of the vibrations. Very, very powerful experience.
Dinner is a short walk from the gardens at the Kew Village Pub in the train station. Dick buys a pint of London Pride for our deceased friend Ed Vidunas (Pride was his favorite). Ed was an avid beer aficionado and anglophile and visited this pub often.
After dinner and a traffic jammed ride, Shaun and Carol dropped us off at our hotel at Heathrow. Many, many thanks!
