Wednesday 13 July 2020 Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square

 Today I ventured a bit farther afield. 

I took the tube, the Northern Line from the Hampstead Tube Station. 

As soon as I got into the station I ran into one of the great truism of any subway system -- if there is an elevator to get to/from the platform -- take it!  A sign said the platform was 320 steps down! And up when returning! With an incredibly generous 26 steps per floor, that's still 11 stories down!  The station must have been a great bomb shelter during WWII. 

Paying for the tube, buses and trains is amazingly easy now. You can just use a no contact credit card instead of having to buy a ticket. You just have to lay the card on the entry pad going in and then remember to check out when leaving the station so you only get charged for your actual journey. 

I got off at the Leicester Square station and followed the signs to Covent Garden.  https://www.coventgarden.london/

It's a very touristy area with fun shops to browse. It's in the West End, which is the equivalent of Broadway. 

There's street performers, and this guy had a skeleton marionette doing Elvis songs.

After browsing around for a while, I made my way to Trafalgar Square. I was glad to see Big Ben returned to its glory. It had been covered in scaffolding for quite some time, while it was refurbished.

There are four plinths at the top of the square. Three of them have permanent statues, but the fourth has changing displays. This is the current one right now. 

I checked out the National Gallery quickly. 

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ 

It's so great that the main museums in London are free! They have kiosks for donating but there are no tickets. So I just checked out a few rooms at this point. 

One picture that really caught my eye was Ruben's A Lion Hunt

And that felt like enough wandering for the day and I headed back from the Charing Cross station which is just outside Trafalgar Square. 

I took the Northern Line north back to Hampshire. And believe me, took the elevator.