A Walk Through the Streets of London

It is a cold and blustery morning in London. Squalls of snow blow through occasionally, although never leaving more than a skiff on the ground.

It is also Easter Sunday. I'm not sure what to expect, but I anticipate perhaps some of the pageantry such as one may see during Holy Week in Spain. Being Easter weekend, this massive city is packed with travelers like ourselves, seeking to get a taste of the British capital.

We begin at the Horse Guards Parade, a large parade ground just off of St. James Park, where a changing of the guard ceremony is taking place. Uniformed men are dressed in black tunics and gold helmets with red plumes. They march their horses and face their counterparts, who are dressed in red tunics. Mounted on black horses they face each other for about thirty minutes, then ride away. It is interesting, but not a whole lot to it (to my untrained eye), and certainly not what we expected.

A short walk leads us to Trafalgar Square, where the towering “Nelson's Column” is surrounded by four lions taking guard. We just happen to be here during a friendly “Free Tibet” protest.

In the middle of the square is pleasant fountain of water. In the basin of the fountain is a statue of several mermaids, a shark, and dolphin, with water shooting from their mouths. The square also shares the front steps to the National Gallery, a huge (free) museum of classical paintings, including Rembrandt, da Vinci, and Van Gogh.

We walk along The Mall, a street that leads from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. It is flanked on one side by St. James Park, a repository of trees and ponds. From here we can see what I suppose to be the tops of white buildings on Downing Street (where the Prime Minister lives), and also the tower of Big Ben.

When we arrive at Buckingham Palace, the first thing we notice is that the British Flag is raised. That means that the queen is in.

We watch the sentinel standing motionless in a blue-gray uniform next to one of the doors, his rifle held tight in his right arm, barrel facing up. He looks young, like a kid still in high school. On this blustery day, it is no surprise that his cap blows off. The sentinel holds motionless and another man walks up, scoops the cap from the ground, and replaces it to his head.

Walking away from Buckingham Palace now, and toward the House of Parliament, we stroll along Birdcage Walk. This road flanks the other side of St. Jame's Park and has a large canopy of oak trees.

Nearby is Westminster Abbey, the Gothic church where British royalty have been coronated since William the Conqueror in 1066. Princess Diana had her marriage and her funeral here.

I would like to go inside, but on the Easter Sunday, the line is out the door. We decide to move on.

Our path takes us around Parliament Square and to Great George Street where we find this view of Parliament with a traditional London cabbie.

In another five minutes, we are on Westminster Bridge, crossing the River Thames. Looking on the south side of the bridge, there is a great view of Big Ben and the House of Parliament . . .

. . . and looking on the north side, an awesome view of the London Eye.

Soon we are on the South Bank making a mandatory visit to London Bridge. There is nothing special about the bridge that is here now—it is just steel and concrete. But the bridges of the past, beginning in Roman days, must have been special enough that a nursery rhyme was written about one of them. The last London Bridge that was “falling down” was sold to an American in 1968. It was torn down, shipped overseas to Lake Havasu, Arizona, where it was pieced back together.

We are sightseeing on The Queen's Walk, a promenade on the south bank of the River Thames. From here, we look across the river and see “The City,” or the financial district of London.

The weather is soggy and very chilly. Our umbrellas have been put to good use. While on The Queens Walk, we stop for a picture with Tower Bridge in the background.

Just before crossing the Tower Bridge we catch our only glimpse of the Easter celebration in London. A man dressed in a bunny suit roams up and down the sidewalk with no particular purpose. This secular icon is disappointing to me, showing no semblance of Holy Week in Spain.

We cross Tower Bridge, just as we would cross any bridge. It is truly an elegant structure, with two Victorian Towers and light-blue suspension cables, but it is too cold to enjoy much of the detail. While crossing, we take a picture looking out over the Thames, toward the HMS Belfast, London's floating naval museum.

Now back on the North Bank, the Tower of London is our next goal. Our first challenge is to buy tickets. We wait in line for thirty minutes to purchase two tickets at £30 a piece. The lines are long and I notice that most of the tourists are from Spain. Sometimes it seems as if 70% of the language I hear on the street is Castillian Spanish. Now I know where Spain disappears to during Holy Week.

But Spaniards aren't the only ones here. London has people from everywhere in the world. While waiting outside the ticket line, we spot this group of men with turbans on their heads, eating lunch.

The Tower of London was built in 1078 by William the Conqueror. It served primarily as a Royal residence and has also housed the Crown Jewels.

Yeomen Warders, or Beefeaters as they are more commonly known, traditionally served as prison guards and custodians to the Crown Jewels. Now days, they act as tour-guides.

The tower is famous for its prison. An underground chamber displays common torture methods, including being hung from manacles, and stretched on the rack. There is also a large metal ring that wraps around the prisoner and painfully squeezes his body together.

Many prisoners within the tower etched their names as graffiti onto the walls. One was Thomas Steven[s] from 1540, imprisoned for highway robbery. This greatly catches my attention because in my own genealogy I have four generations of Thomas Stevens, and the furthest one I can trace back puts him in or near London in 1575. Still a little too late to be the Thomas Stevens from The Tower prison, but maybe it was a dad, or grandfather.

Next we venture into The City, which on Easter day is a deserted borough with a narrow two-lane road sandwiched between skyscrapers. I am looking for Cornhill. I don't know of any points of interest here, other than Dickens mentions it in his book, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge begrudgingly lets his store clerk go home for the holiday. “. . . the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honor of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town, as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's buff.”

We find Cornhill, which doesn't appear to be much of a hill—which may or may not be the Cornhill of Dicken's novel—and we walk along it for a short period until it comes to a merging intersection with Threadneedle Street. On a concrete pedestal is a statue of the Duke of Wellington riding his horse.

Not too far away is St. Paul's Cathedral. The front steps of the church was the setting for Mary Poppin's song, Feed the Birds, where the old lady is selling bags of crumbs, and birds are flying all around her.

We are able to step inside the cathedral and stay toward the back of the chapel, free of charge. The interior is well-lit, high, and symmetrical. The distinguishing feature, however, is the dome, which is the second largest cathedral dome in the world. They say that at the base of the dome, you can whisper and hear it from the other side.

We stop at a little pastry shop and eat a Cornish Pastry before getting on the tube and riding the red line to Oxford Circus. It is now getting dark as we emerge back above ground and find ourselves on Oxford Street. We discover a book store where I buy a good Jeffery Archer novel for the plane trip home. We buy the kids some souvenirs at a gift shop.

We are in the Soho area of London, and soon we encounter Gerrard Street, the gateway to Chinatown. We walk beneath the ornately decorated paifang, or Chinese gate. All the writing on the buildings is now in Chinese script and store-front windows display Asian goods and even ducks roasting on a spit. Stores are full of exotic produce and fish.

After Chinatown, it is just a small walk past Leicester Square and on to Coventry Street until we are at Piccadilly Circus. This popular iconic spot is the junction of seven different streets and home to a large neon sign that draws comparisons to Times Square in New York. It is now dark and Piccadilly Circus is a panorama of well-lit buildings and in the middle of them all a statue of Eros.

Inside one of the adjacent buildings we find a shopping mall of sorts, and there a quaint Moroccan-style restaurant. We sit down at a low table and order a late-evening meal. We are very tired and ready to call it the night.

After our meal, we descend the stairs to the underground, and take the tube to our hotel. 

 

Salt Creek Beach

The paved pedestrian path that leads down the slope toward Salt Creek Beach is interesting in its own right. It passes beneath a concrete bridge that supports Ritz Carlton Drive, where a mural of blue dolphins and other sea creatures swim on the walls. A long sloping grassy hill flanks the path, overlooking the vast ocean and Catalina Island in the distance. At the foot of the hill one can see the breaking waves that come systematically one after the other.

Our family walks down the path carrying our towels, sunglasses, cameras—encumbered also with a helium canister and six red roses. We probably look out of place.

Well-dressed people leash up their high-end dogs for a walk to the beach. Surfers in black wet suits walk barefoot, with tether cords wrapped around their boards. A lone player shoots hoops on a basketball half-court at the bottom of the hill.

At last we reach a final flight of stairs to the beach. Salt Creek Beach is very beautiful. The white sand is as fine as any that I've seen. Large cliffs hanging with vegetation surround the beach. One cliff is more prominent than the rest and on top is the Ritz Carlton Hotel.  From our angle we can see a few tiny people leaning over a railing.

(I have a friend who once worked at the Ritz Carlton while living in Laguna Niguel. He was a valet, parking expensive cars for a cast of celebrities. He told of parking Ozzy Osbourne's car, and how he used a cane and walked like a crippled old man—hardly the same person seen on stage.)

The ocean water coming in off the waves is crystal clear. I feel like I could drink it. The water is shallow here, scarcely rising above the shins for several dozen feet. Beyond the shallow area, a cast of surfers bob up and down on the waves, looking for a bite.

We find our own spot on the beach and Jenelle sits down on the sand and removes the canister from the box and two bags of balloons. One by one she inflates the balloons with helium, ties them off, lashes a ribbon, cuts the string at about three feet, then hands them to me. In about ten minutes I am holding fourteen purple and three white balloons.

Jenelle sets up the tripod and we pose for a family portrait while Jordan holds all seventeen balloons in his left hand, fist clinched tight to keep the balloons from drifting away.

Then Jenelle hands the balloons out: three purple to Jordan, three purple to Kaitlyn, three purple to Jenna, three purple to Savanah, two purple to me, and keeps the three whites for herself.

Today represents three years that Brittany has been gone.

My wife and I have lost a daughter, and our kids have lost a sister. Fourteen purple balloons represent the fourteens amazing years that we spent with her on earth; three white balloons represent the three years she has lived in heaven.

Jenna and Savanah release their balloons first, and shortly after, Jordan and Kaitlyn. Jenelle is the last to release, and we all watch as the cluster of colored bubbles drifts high and inland, above the Laguna Cliffs and in a northeastern direction. The white balloons become difficult to follow, being a less prominent color and smaller than the purple. As we crane our necks, I'm sure we have the attention of others on the beach who are craning their necks also, curious of our little ceremony.

Once the balloons are out of sight, Jenelle hands a rose to each of the girls. There is nothing formal about the roses. It is a little something to remember Brittany. Savanah walks over to the edge of the lapping waves and tosses the flower into the water and watches it sucked up in the backwash, tossed inside the waves, and washed back to shore. The rose looks very pretty when it sits upon the heavy sand, laying on its side, the red petals resting gently on the sandy pillow.

A sad truth with death is that we must move on.

Jenna finds a section of the beach where a vertical strata of long black rocks protrude from the surface like spines of lava. Adjacent are a series of tide pools. Up against the shore where the waves have washed at high-tide is a layer of smooth black pebbles and sea shells. Many of the pebbles are pierced with perfectly smooth holes. The shells come in crazy shapes, some with wild growths that look like organ pipes. She is excited to tell us of her find.

Salt Creek Beach is a great people-watching place. There are swimmers, surfers, children building sand castles, photographers, sun bathers, and women pushing strollers.

Before we leave, I notice that the roses have been arranged around a conical mound with a moat surrounding it, and decorated somewhat elegantly. I ask Jenelle about it and she says that some little girls “found” them laying on the beach and decided to make a sand castle with them. I'll bet this made Brittany happy as she watched from above. She was always the imaginative type who loved to play with children. ♠

Capistrano Beach

Early morning on a beach always has a different feel to it. The pink hues of dawn peek over the ocean and although the world has been asleep overnight, the constant crashing of the waves continue against the shore, persisting as they will evermore.

I am walking along the southern shore at Doheny State Beach where a motor home is parked along the road next to a pair of palm trees, curtains drawn for privacy. Surely they are still asleep. The only other person I see is a man in a navy-blue jacket and holding a bag, collecting shells or stones from the sand. I am walking his direction, but we ignore each other, neither one wishing to talk with anyone else.

I watch a white pelican with her black-tipped wings and long pointed beak fly back and forth, parallel with shore, land on an undulating current, then fly away as soon as it breaks. By this time, the sun has risen just above the coast line, though still behind clouds and without symphony.

I continue walking along the shore, toward the rising sun, and past the man collecting items from the sand, and nearing Capistrano Beach Park. A homeless man rummages through a garbage can, gleaning what he can before the workers come to dump the trash. Beyond him on the pavement I see a cyclist with long black tights and a stocking cap over his ears.

Across the highway and perched upon high bluffs are large homes built right to the edge of the cliff. Lush vegetation grows on the bluff and it must be a beautiful place to live with an exceptional view of the ocean.

I arrive at the facilities at Capistrano Beach Park and see an elderly couple sitting on a bench watching the waves roll in. A white truck with two workers inside is parked adjacent to the sidewalk, door ajar, and cigarette smoke coming from the cab. They are probably deciding whether they want to begin cleaning, or just wait and watch the ocean.

I now come to a large wooden deck, and next to me is a basketball court. The fragrance of pine wafts up from the planks. I stop at a corner railing of the deck and spend a moment contemplating the situation. The waves wash up directly below the planks. A chilly morning breeze picks up.

Further up along the shore are a long line of multi-million dollar homes. How would it be to have a home just yards away from the Pacific Ocean? Do they know what they have, or do they take it for granted? For me, I'm lucky if I make it to the beach once a year. It is pure heaven every time I'm here.

Now it's time to walk back to the hotel and wake up my family. They don't know what they're missing.

So I ask, what would make a family travel 454 miles, just to visit the beach? We're not going to Disneyland or Sea World, and we're only here for the weekend.

From the balcony of our hotel you can look down and see the jacuzzi, and then look across the highway and see the tall waves coming in and breaking against the shore—a small tsunami of white rollers that create a crash so loud that the noise reverberates against the walls of the hotel.

The sun is now higher in the sky and with my family I make the walk over the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Pacific Coast Highway and a rail line for California Amtrak. Once on the other side we are on the beach and immediately there is a sign warning beach-goers of the steep beach face. “Strong shorebreak can knock you down and powerful backwash can pull you out into the deep water,” the sign warns.

We are back on the Doheny side of the coast. We take off our socks and shoes and roll up our pants, but the sand is rockier than most beaches, with medium-sized black pebbles that are smooth but still unpleasant to walk on. The places where the tide washes up over the sand is soft with few rocks and these are the places we seek out to wade in the water.

Jordan has brought his drone and is flying it over the shore. It is brand new and just last week he got it stuck in a tall tree, so I am sure he is hesitant to fly it too far over the ocean.

The kids have found a stick and are carving a cursive “Brittany” into the smooth part of the sand, just high enough where the waves won't touch it. It is interesting here that the waves seem to break closer to the shore, and appear larger and more violent than normal. This is probably due to the sudden depth of the water near the shore.

Jenelle and I decide to hold hands and take a walk along the beach away from the kids. I walk along the inside to take the brunt of any high washer that might strike us. Sometimes, when we are walking on a rocky patch, a wave comes in that covers our ankles and up to our shins in white foam, and I can feel a storm of pebbles pounding against my feet in a turbulent swirl like that of a washing machine, enduring painfully for about ten seconds, then subsiding as the wash reverts back to the ocean.

As we walk toward Dana Point, we pass a large berm that separates the water from a campground. Someone has propped a decorated Christmas tree into the sand on top of the berm and there are two empty lawn chairs next to it.

We arrive at the point of the beach where San Juan Creek runs into the ocean. Sometimes at high tide there is more water, but now it is low. We stop and sit on the berm and contemplate to ourselves, saying very little in conversation.

This must be where the waves become better for surfers, as several are congregated here, and others are in the water to catch a roller. On the other side of the creek is a more popular beach that is closer to the harbor. 

It is on that beach that we took the family many years ago after a trip to Disneyland. They were young and I don't remember much about the beach other than we got lots of sand in the van and Kaitlyn may have lost a bucket in the water. I remember lots of seagulls and trying to get pictures of them.

But it was the fact that Brittany was with us on that beach that makes it special to me. I don't remember anything that she did that day, but I know that she was with us, a little girl about three or four years old at the time.

So, why would a family travel 454 miles just to go to the beach? This is why. To reconnect and remember Brittany.

Brittany loved the beach. Living so far away, we rarely went, but when we did she reveled in the moment, taking in the salty sea weed breeze, and walking barefoot along the sand, and letting the waves come in and immerse her feet. The last beach we ever went with her was Santa Monica Beach, and she played in the water until well after dusk.

After returning home to Utah she would always ask when we were going back to California. She really wanted to go to Disneyland, but the thing she wanted most was to go to the beach. “If the beach was the only place we went, Dad, I would be happy.”

Unfortunately, we never made it back. But about a year and a half before she died, Jenelle and I decided to go on vacation, and Brittany spent two weeks at our neighbor's house. It just happened that during that time they had a wedding in San Diego, so they took Brittany along. They spent a day at the beach in Oceanside and Brittany couldn't get enough.

Looking back, that was one of those tender mercies from God, giving one more opportunity to visit the beach before she passed on to the other side.

This trip is to honor her. Sometimes I feel bad that we have traveled to California and the beach far more times without her than we ever did when she was alive. But Jenelle reminds me that she is probably here with us and enjoying the beach in her own spiritual realm.

We make the long walk back to the kids and find them safe. I can see where Jenna attempted to write Brittany's name by placing pebbles into the contour of letters, but getting them washed away by the waves. Kaitlyn and Savanah built a sand turtle with a moat around it. Now all three play a game where they guess how far the waves will roll in by standing at that point. Sometimes they get drenched, sometimes they stay dry, and sometimes the water just barely touches their toes, and if that happens, they win.

Now it is near dusk, and after a day spent inland, we are back on the southern shores of Doheny Beach. I take half an hour to enjoy the sunset, this time leaving on my shoes.

I will admit that we smuggled firewood into California. Someone had told us that firewood is confiscated at the agricultural checkpoint, but we decided to chance it and no one ever stopped us.

I open the hatch of our Trailblazer and pull out three slabs of heavy juniper, with the furry bark still attached. Dotted along the beach are concrete fire-basins. I stack the wood like a tee pee and below insert three fire-starting logs that I bought at Wal-Mart. Within ten minutes the blaze has flared up, sending flames that can be seen over the rim of the basin.

Our meal isn't too elaborate. Just hot dogs, with a potato salad from Ralph's, and chips. We brought roasting sticks to cook the hot dogs over the flames. For desert I place a kettle of water over coals and we warm it up for hot chocolate. Then we drink the cocoa with Tim Tams, biting the tip off of each end of the cookie, using it as a straw to suck up the drink, then devouring the cookie with our mouth before it dissolves into nothing.

The night is getting cooler and it feels good to stand next to the flames, hold out hands, and feel the heat against the skin. The juniper burns strong and heavy. On the other side of the fence we can faintly hear the traffic from the Coast Highway, but it is overwhelmed by the breaking of the waves and the snapping of the fire. Every fifteen minutes an Amtrak train whizzes by.

Now that the meal is over, and the fire is still keeping us warm, Jenelle gets her laptop computer from the Trailblazer and sets it on a picnic table that we have dragged next to the fire pit. We all gather around, and for the next ten minutes we watch our Brittany video.

This is the same video that my brother-in-law, Jay, made for Brittany's funeral. It begins with her birth and pictures of Grandma and Grandpa holding her, then through her childhood and holding a fish that she caught with Uncle Brent, and as a teenager when she wore lipstick and mascara in the Middle School play, up to the whole family surrounding her bed at the hospital, only minutes from taking her final breath.

Of course, we can't help but to cry. I really miss my little Britt.

After wiping my eyes dry, I decide to take one last venture to the water. The lights have come on up the coastline at Dana Point, but looking seaward all is dark, except one lone flash on the horizon.

I am with Kaitlyn—the rest of the family staying by the fire which is about fifty yards away. The waves seem taller now, and more violent when they crash. Although the ocean is a very dark black, the whitewater on the waves shows up well. Sometimes a wave will come in and break like a fuse being lit, crashing right to left, like a giant zipper pulling closed—then a resounding boom!

We stand at the shore and watch the white foam wash toward our feet, but never quite reaching. ♠