The last two days in London have been a whirlwind. Tracy arrived, and after navigating a passport line that took several hours (!), she met up with me at a Starbucks at the Tube stop nearest our hotel, where I’d been people-watching. After dropping our bags, we headed out into London to do what any tourists would: Walk like crazy. We headed up through Hyde Park and St. James Park, stopped for lunch from Pret a Manger eaten on the steps of the National Gallery (we’re so upscale), and walked on to the Courtauld Gallery, one of my favorite little museums. They have a fascinating exhibition of drawings by a 19th Century spiritualist named Georgiana Houghton, whose abstract drawings she said were guided by her communication with spirits (her deceased family members, Christ, the usual suspects). They are abstract and incredibly layered whirls of colored lines that Tracy rightly pointed out looked like something done with a Spiro-graph, that childhood art toy. Except Houghton did it all freehand, and put layer upon layer upon layer of lines. The museum helpfully had a box of magnifying glasses so you could get in close. Amzing work that anticipated abstract painting.

We enjoyed the rest of the Courtauld collection, which has a lot of modern work we enjoyed seeing (Lautrec, Matisse, Van Gogh). Then we walked down to the river and back to our hotel. Tracy’s helpful Fitbit suggests we did eight or nine miles, on a day when Tracy had just been on a red-eye flight and gotten only a few hours of sleep. After a pleasant dinner at which the day started to catch up with Tracy, we collapsed for the night.

Yesterday, we set out in the morning for the Camden Markets, a collection of stalls. After wrestling our way through the rush hour Tube crowds (we had to wait as four packed trains let basically on one on before we crammed into a train and made our way to Camden Town. The Market was a bit disappointing, because the drowsy shopkeepers were just opening up a bit after  9am (no big surprise,  guess), so we had a little breakfast and moved to the next step of our plan, walking along Regent’s Canal, which has a great towpath and lots of pretty canal boats, down around Regent’s Park, and then walk back down to Kensington, through Hyde Park. Lovely walking, then interrupted by less lovely walking to get under a highway, then down into the park and across to the Royal Albert Hall, where we took an absolutely amazing hour-long tour of the hall. It’s an incredible space, and we were so impressed that on our last day in England, the 23rd, we are considering getting the earliest train possible from the end of our walk in Eastbourne back to London so that we can catch a shockingly inexpensive 11am concert at the hall.

After a short rest at our hotel, we set out again, this time using the Tube to get to the Millennium Bridge, an awesome people-only bridge across the Thames. That took us to the Tate Modern, where we saw the most enormous exhibit of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. Tracy’s a big fan of O’Keeffe, so the timing of this exhibit seemed like fate. And they had paintings from periods of O’Keeffe’s life I had never seen before, and even Tracy, who has been to O’Keeffe’s house and museum in New Mexico, was impressed and seeing new things. Feeling a bit saturated, we whizzed through some other galleries in the Tate, not giving these other artists the attention they deserve.

Had a pleasant dinner at a pizza place (another win for Tracy the pizza fanatic), and headed to the Globe to see Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was hilarious, with the Rude Mechanicals actually doing the pre-curtain announcements in comic style (“In case of a fire, make broad paths to let the actors out first”). The whole production was very broad (as this play should be) and had a bold rethinking: In this production, the four lovers were not, as written, all straight. Helena, who loves Demetrius but who he claims now not to love back, was made Helenus, which gave the play some new layers. Also, they production tapped into the several mentions of India in the script (the king and queen of the fairies are arguing over an “Indian boy” the queen has adopted and the king wants as a member of his entourage, seemingly just to spite the queen) and gave the whole production an Indian twist, with sitar music for the songs (more songs than even Shakespeare planned). When the four lovers are all bewitched an in love with the wrong people and chasing each other, this staging had the sprite Puck draw a big chalk circular line, and then the four chased each other around in circles. Totally inspired use of space. It was a sensational end to a great day. Tracy tells me we easily did ten miles and probably more of walking, which is good to keep me in training for the next seven days of hilly walking.

Today, we will see an exhibition of paintings by Mary Heilmann, a contemporary artist, at a gallery in Whitechapel, listen to a free concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and then catch a train to Winchester. Tomorrow, it’s back to the small towns and countryside, but this has been a wonderful pause to refresh in London.