London Marathon...

On April 21, we went to watch some of the London Marathon as the route came near Shadwell. We couldn’t join the hashers at their beer stop since Jimmy had a flight to catch that afternoon and I was heading to Winchester to visit Carlin. 

Here are the elite men flying by...

…and the elite women. We stuck around long enough to see some of the first non-elite runners came past. 

What we hadn’t taken into consideration was that roads in our neighborhood was completely cut off, so anyone wanting to get anywhere would need to take the Overground. I was shocked when I saw the huge line outside of the station as staff had to control how many people could stand on the thin platforms. I had built in only an extra 15 minutes to get to Waterloo and quickly realized that wouldn’t be enough time and I would likely miss my train. So I decided to walk to London Bridge Station in hopes of having better luck. While it wasn’t much fun walking with my duffel bag, it was cool walking past the runners on Tower Bridge. 

London Bridge was also crazy busy, so I went ahead and walked to Waterloo. Despite being an hour late, the conductor luckily agreed to honor my ticket. Jimmy’s journey to City Airport was a bit rerouted, but he had the good fortune that he was brought through a back door down to the platform at Wapping. Since then we have learned about a pedestrian tunnel that would have allowed us to get to Shadwell Station and I have already marked my calendar to avoid travelling on next year’s marathon.