Dear Old Fictional Friends

There are certain things that you should have done together with a friend that has put up with you and your weirdness for the last thirteen years. To celebrate ten years of firendship we travelled to New York City together in 2012 but despite both of us being huge Potterheads we've never been to London together. We felt it was time to rectify that.

Highgate Cemetery
One of my wishes for the trip was to go to Highgate Cemetery. Partly because the Cemetery itself is beautiful in its own overgrown way and I can be silly among the ivy and headstones (see photo to the left) but also because some of The Greats have been buried here since its opening in 1839.
Highgate Cemetery has two parts; East and West. We visited the East Cemetery, which you can do for free, but the West Cemetery is accessible by guided tours. It's more elaborate with catacombs, mausoleums, vaults and bigger monuments. Also, the West section was used in filming Dorian Gray (2009). We didn't go there. We found out there were some large, rare spiders nesting in the West Cemetery.

One of The Greats I spoke of before being in particular one Douglas Adams in my not-so-humble opinion. Adams is without hesitation my all time favourite author. He wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the books about Dirk Gently, Starship Titanic and some classic Doctor Who.
Forever loved and forever remembered.

Nerds, Adams is the reason You should always know where Your Towel is.
Join in on Towel Day on the 25th of May, because a Towel is just about the most useful thing an intergalactic hitchhiker can carry with them.

Everything is Harry Potter.
Our main purpose for this trip was to go to Warner Bros Studio Tours - The Making of Harry Potter in Leavesden. We've been talking about it since they built it years ago and we were definitely not feeling twenty-seven by the time we arrived at the studio. These books have been with us since we were twelve years old. We grew into adults with them. I, for one, cried tears of joy when I stepped onto Platform 9 3/4 and saw the Hogwarts Express.

We love the books but are not great fans of the movies. I'd say they did a good job with most of the story but nothing will ever be as amazing as one's own imagination. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until my dying days.

We walked through the creative process from books to movies, hitched a ride with the Knight Bus, drank butterbeer (YUCK, by the way, yuck) and had a blast.

We certainly bought souvenirs to bring back home. I'm drinking coffee out of mine as I write.

I love being a nerd. It offers me a perfectly good excuse to act like a total weirdo when faced with things like scale models of fictional castles.

What else?
Being nerds meant that we simply had to go to certain places. But then we are also more than nerds so there were more things to do while in dear old Londinium.
We went to pubs because I like beer. We had some great food and some less than great food because we both love eating. I bought shoes of course (just one pair). We went to Ogre's Nest for board games and Forbidden Planet (twice) because awesomeness. We went to Oxford Street to find Disney Store but they didn't have much to offer us older children. We took a stroll through Kensington Park (and had a real party when we met a friendly and playful puppy). We went to Camden Town and saw the same shirts being peddled by a hundred different people at a hundred different prices.
As it turned out we found most of the things Harry Potter at other locations than The Making of Harry Potter though; PJ's at Primark, shirts in Camden and a passport holder at Forbidden Planet.

Trevor
It was a good vacation. The only thing that put a hamper on our good moods was that the cleaning staff at our hotel left a lot to be desired. We named the dead cockroach lying on the stairs Trevor. We felt brave to be eating the hotel breakfast every morning.

Cheers!