My London Marathon

To get to Kinshasa I flew from Denver to London to Johannesburg and then on to Kinshasa. When I arrived in London, I had 6 hours between flights, so I decided to take the Underground into the city and go for a leisurely Sunday afternoon walk. (Unfortunately, it was too late in the day for me to attend a sacrament meeting in London.) I pictured that the city center would be relatively quiet. Little did I know, Sunday was the London Marathon! It reminded me of the day many years ago when my sister and I came up out of the Metro in Paris into a giant crowd only to find out that we were on the Champs Elysees during the end of the Tour de France! I walked from the Green Park Tube station over to Buckingham Palace and, low and behold, the end of the marathon course is right there along the Mall just down the street from the palace. The people crossing the finish line at that time were those at about the 5 hour mark. Hundreds of people running! Probably thousands of entrants. There was a lot of excitement as the runners passed Buckingham Palace and entered their final leg. What a great race to run in along all of the famous sites! I navigated the huge crowd and walked along the Serpentine in St. Jame's Park and then walked down the center of Whitehall street (with Big Ben at one end and Lord Nelson's column at the other and, like many roads, closed to motorized traffic for the race) and then walked down to Trafalgar Square. There in the square is a giant countdown clock for the London Summer Olympics. I ducked out of the rain and into the National Gallery to view some famous paintings including many of the the Savior as I listened to the talks from the most recent General Conference (listen or watch at gc.lds.org), which I had downloaded to my ipod in French to help retrain my brain to understand this beautiful language that I learned more than 30 years ago while I served as a missionary in France. It was an unusual but fun way to spend the Sabbath! I recently heard from a friend that the original Marathon was instituted in commemoration of the fabled run of the Greek soldier  Pheidippides, a messenger from the Battle of Marathon (the namesake of the race) to Athens. My London Marathon was probably only 2.62 miles, but my air marathon continues. Now on to Kinshasa . . .