At 6:32 on Sunday morning I appeared at my parents’ door to escort them to The Regent's Park. I had puzzled over the best way to get them there without making them walk too far. I decided that they should take the Circle line tube from King’s Cross to Great Portland Street station, which is almost right across the street from Regent’s Park. (They could have gotten the tube from Euston Square instead, but both King’s Cross and Euston Square are about the same distance from the hotel, so it seemed best to go to a station that they were more familiar with.) I let my father use my Oyster card and I would just run there instead.
I walked them to King’s Cross then took off up Euston Road toward Great Portland Street. I had told them to meet me outside the station, but I wasn’t sure whether they or I would get there first. When I arrived there was no sign of them. I peered inside the station in case they were coming through the gates, but the station was empty. I decided to run around the outside of the station to pass the time while I waited (it’s a very small station). Each time as I passed the entrance I looked inside, until after three or four times I decided that I wouldn’t look in again until I did ten loops. (I cheated and looked after a few more circles, but they still weren’t there.) So , after ten times I started on another ten—and after number twelve I rounded the front of the station to see them sitting on a bench. They said that there had been a long delay waiting for the train—not surprising before 7 a.m. on Sunday morning.
As usual in London, taking the tube (or bus) to the stop nearest your destination doesn’t mean you don’t have a walk ahead of you.
To get to the rose garden in Regent’s Park we still had to cross Euston Road (or actually Marylebone Road, as Euston turns into Marylebone at Great Portland Street), enter the park by way of Park Square East and St. Andrew’s Gate (my usual entry point), follow a path west to the Broad Walk, then walk north on the Broad Walk until you take a left on Chester Road, which will lead you directly to the entrance of Queen Mary’s Gardens (and the rose garden is, luckily, right inside). 
Just a hop, skip, and a jump, really.
Since I was foregoing my usual run around the park, I ran back and forth on the Broad Walk and Chester Road until my parents caught up to me at the gates to the gardens. We walked in, and the roses were every bit as magnificent as the day before.
Rosy pink swags of rambling roses, massed beds of white, pink, red, yellow, and amazing sunrise and sunset shades from appricot to orange. The rose gardens contain more than 30,000 rose bushes of 400 varieties.A few of the lovely roses....
A cool blue delphinium border, edged with catmint or something similar (I can’t quite make it out for sure), provides a contrasting backdrop to the beds of roses.
Queen Mary’s Gardens extend beyond the roses to other mixed borders, trees, and shrubs, but our time that morning was limited, so as we came to the end of the roses we turned around and circled back to the entry.
It would be so easy, and wonderful, to spend hours at Regent’s Park walking in the gardens and sitting on benches, but breakfast awaited at the hotel. Not to mention that my father had a train to catch.Later that morning Regent’s Park was to be the site of a green fair and bike rally, so our peaceful, solitary park would be swarming with people. We were happy to have the roses almost to ourselves, joined by only the occasional walker, runner, or early morning photographer. All my visits to Regent’s Park have been early in the morning, so I consider it my personal park, and am not too eager to share it with the mobs! Even without the fair, all the parks are are magnets to visitors on sunny summer days, city dwellers seeking a bit of countryside and green.
Regent’s Park is one of London’s largest parks, covering 410 acres. On the south side it is only about a mile from central London, close to Paddington, Baker Street, and my own Euston and Bloomsbury areas. On the north side it borders the residential area of Primrose Hill (where Mark Darcy lived in the book version of Bridget Jones’s Diary). In addition to Queen Mary’s Gardens in the center and other landscaped areas, the Park is home to the London Zoo at the north end, London’s Central Mosque at the west, a college, an open air theatre, and several cafés and restaurants (plus a sausage cart).
On one side of the park there is a boating lake, as well as a smaller pond in the rose garden (site of the “dead duck” incident in the movie About a Boy.)I returned my parents to the Great Portland Street station around 8:20. Breakfast finished at 9:00, and if the trains took as long as they had on the way, they might not get back in time. I knew I would get back in plenty of time, so we agreed that I would order their breakfast if they didn’t return before 9:00. But as I was finishing an extra loop around the block by the hotel, there they were walking down the street (at only 8:45 a.m.)—in plenty of time for breakfast.
My dad took off right after breakfast to catch a train to Newcastle. I had promised my mother already that today would be a "light" day (despite the 6:30 a.m. trip to Regent's Park). So I freed her from any obligations until we went to tea in the late afternoon. I had originally planned to go out myself and then come back to get her for tea, but as I sat down to write I realized that maybe I too should have a somewhat unencumbered afternoon, with time to write and just hang out. Despite my rather full schedule over the past couple weeks, I haven't felt unusually tired—although I have upped the strength of my lattes to triple talls and quadruple grandes (and I don't know if I can go back!).
Like the day before, the weather was bright and sunny on Sunday. As I ventured out to Starbucks around 10:30 or 11, the streets were Sunday morning quiet, only a handful of people out and even fewer cars, offering a sense of peacefulness that was rare for London. I settled myself in the hotel lounge with my latte and computer, and let the afternoon while itself away.
Around 2:00 or so I suggested to my mother that we walk down the street to the Brunswick shopping centre and get a little bit of lunch to hold us over till tea later on. 
The Brunswick Centre is a newly renovated shopping area and residential block close to Russell Square tube, a concrete and glass behemoth which has apparently been a London landmark since it was built in the sixties. (Who knew? I just thought it was an apartment building and shopping center which has been spruced up in recent years. I used to shop at the somewhat dingy Safeway store in college; it was closed a few years ago and is now replaced by a shiny new Waitrose and other retail shops.) 
There are a number of moderately priced, trendy casual restaurants there, and we went into one called Nando's, an English chain specializing in grilled chicken, and ordered grilled chicken Caesar salads. (The meal-size salad, virtually unheard of in England even a few years ago, has now become almost as ubiquitous here as in the U.S.)
I wanted to stop at Fortnum & Mason before going to Brown's Hotel for tea, so we decided to leave at 3:30 to allow plenty of time to get there. After spending the day in a t-shirt (my Wells Fun Run shirt) and baggy pants, I wanted to dress up for tea, so I changed into the cotton wrap dress that I had brought along especially to wear to Brown's. Unlike most wrap dresses, this one had very little overlap in the skirt, so there was a rather unnerving tendency for the skirt to flip open unexpectedly. I spent quite a bit of time holding it together, especially in gusts of wind!
Fortnum & Mason is about halfway down Piccadilly between Piccadilly Circus and Green Park. We took the tube to Piccadilly Circus and it only took a few minutes to walk to Fortnum & Mason. The visit to Fortnum & Mason did not take long, partly because F & M is undergoing renovations and thus offered a lot less to explore than usual. After a stop at Hatchard's, the venerable bookstore next door to Fortnum and Mason, we continued on down Piccadilly and crossed at Albemarle Street to head to Brown's Hotel.
After a few minutes wait (we were early), they showed us to our table and our Brown's tea experience began. Afternoon tea at a fancy hotel is a pricy proposition at the best of times, and a poor exchange rate makes it so expensive as to begin to wonder whether it is even justifiable at all! But if any expensive tearoom offers an opportunity to get your money's worth, it is Brown's Hotel. Brown's generously provides unlimited seconds (thirds, etc.) on all aspects of the tea—sandwiches, scones, and sweets—so depending on how hungry and/or piggish you feel, you can make afternoon tea into quite a meal.
A few years ago Brown's redecorated the tearoom, so the lovely old classic library decor has now been replaced with a more contemporary style. 
I feel rather sad about the change, because I liked the old furniture, even if it is quite nice now. At least we were seated at a table whose chairs have arms, and not on the leather cubes that constitute some of the chairs!
I was thankful for the large linen napkin the waiter draped over my lap, so I didn't have to monitor my skirt during tea. Between the top half of my dress dipping low, and the skirt trying to pull open, I was a couple of deep breaths away from sitting there in my underwear! By the time I finished my share of two plates of sandwiches (we did take the seconds), scones, and a few little cakes (we didn't have the stomach for seconds on the scones or cakes), I was convinced that I was threatening the stability of the wrap even more. After we left Brown's, I was completely unable to control the skirt, and my slip was exposed most of the time—at least it is white and doesn't clash with the dress or anything.
Before heading back to the hotel, we walked over to Berkeley Square, just a few blocks behind Brown's Hotel. I've always loved the mention of Berkeley Square in the song—"There were angels dining at the Ritz, and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square"—and I love the line-up of benches with dedication plaques on them. Berkeley Square is very austere, landscaped only with trees, and a few clumps of daffodils in the early spring. On this particular day one end of the park was covered with large tents, apparently meant for some kind of upcoming event.
It is a short walk from Berkeley Square back to Green Park, where we hopped on the tube back to Russell Square and the hotel. As we rounded the corner to Cartwright Gardens, we could see and hear into the hotel lounge, where my father was sitting with the Norwegian cousins, who had stopped by to say Farvel before flying back to Norway early the next day. We learned that Annbjorg had led them on another long walk today, five hours walking from their hotel to Oxford Street and around and about in Oxford Street—after which they hopped on a bus back to their hotel. Luckily they still had enough energy left to walk over to our hotel, so we didn't have to find our way to them (being still overly full of sandwiches and scones).
So goodbyes were exchanged, with promises of visits to Norway soon.
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