Euro Day 22 - (Wo)Man Down

We have done a tremendous amount of walking.  One of the regrets I have on this trip is not having a pedometer that would have tracked steps and mileage but I would guess that we have logged 75 miles or so during the journey.  Just the 6 walks to the train station and back in Ghent would total 10 miles.

This may have been a contributing factor to Kelsey starting to have back muscle spasms over the last two days.  On Friday is was only an irritant but yesterday became a major impediment to her movement.   So she stayed back to get some summer school work completed and watch Netflix.  

The rest of us went down to Picadilly Square - the uber-tourist square in London with such cultural touchstones like the world's largest M&M store.  The boys enjoyed going through Lillywhites - a sporting goods store with a large selection of UK soccer gear. 

After lunch we hit the Tube to go out to Brentford to watch the Brentford-Nottingham Forest soccer match.  These teams are in a league a step below the Premier League but it is very difficult to get tickets to Premier League games without being a member of their club.  Brentford is a great experience because their stadium Griffin Park is very much Fenway in Boston.  It is situated in the middle of a neighborhood with a pub on each corner and has been there since 1904.  

Although my beloved Brentford Bees ultimately fell to Forest (4-3). It was a good English football experience for the family.

We got home at dinner time and Brett had enough of family togetherness and decided to stay home while Jake, Karen and I went to our farewell dinner in London.  We had a nice meal in a traditional English Pub and watched the Track and Field Championships on TV that were in town this week.

Jake and I decided to hit a late night showing of Dunkirk at a theater down the road.  We both thought the movie was OK but not worth the hype that we had heard.  On the way home we decided to pop back into King's Cross Station.  We had visited earlier that morning to see the famed Harry Potter track 9 3/4 but there was an enormous queue (I have been in Europe too long) to simply take your picture in front of the sign.  The gentleman managing the line estimate the wait to be 50 minutes. Now,  I am no stranger to waiting in long lines for very stupid reasons but this was off the table for me.  So it was nice to see no line at 12:30AM.  So that is my London's visitors tip for the day - go to platform 9 3/4 after midnight.