One Boris bike down

I have previously written about how pleased I am that the Boris bikes have spread east to the Isle of Dogs, with bike stations at various convenient places in the island.  Over the Summer I have seen quite a lot of people using the bikes.  The weather's been cooperating so cycling has been a popular activity.  I suppose, with heavy use, it was not before long that one would spot the bike-hire casualties.  This morning I saw a Boris bike in a bush in Millwall park.  Both wheels had been bent badly.  It was a sad thing to see; these bikes are fairly sturdily built so I wonder what had happened to it.  I hope the rider was OK.

Thank you London for the Olympics

Its been over for five days and everybody has had time to sit down and regroup after the mad two weeks when the Olympics came to town.  In my previous post I have said how travel in the capital during this period was actually very well controlled and we had very little trouble crossing town for events with our baby in tow.  One thing that I didn't mention, and is something that I am really grateful for, is the excellent service from the volunteers who helped at the event to ensure the events went well.  Everyone we met was cheerful and helpful, thought quickly on their feet and had a 'can do' attitude.  The army, which was roped in large numbers to help, were efficient and friendly; army personnel certainly made a good impression on me through this exercise.  Why can't we be this harmonious a city all the time?

Olympic madness...erhmm not

I have dutifully kept away from Central London, as much as possible, over the Olympic period following the various warnings prior to the start of the games regarding the possible inundation of the capital by Olympics-related visitors.  So far I have only ventured into the capital twice- once to go into work and once to attend a session in the Volleyball men's preliminaries.  Travel was easy on both occasions- where were the crowds?

I live on the Isle of Dogs and have been seeing a fair number of people in Olympics garb or carrying Olympics related items on their personage on the island.  There are a fair few apartment hotels on the island and it is close to Stratford and Greenwich so it is not wholly surprising that people involved with or attending the Olympics have chosen to stay here.  I am currently on maternity leave and have been walking around the island a fair bit to keep active and Baby entertained while avoiding the alleged Olympics madness elsewhere in London.  Even with the additional folk the island has not felt particularly busy- it was not all that different from usual.  However, I needed to get to work on an urgent matter last week and decided to brave the public transport system to get to South Kensington with sprog in tow as we have been advised against driving into Central London by the powers that be.  The ladies at yoga mentioned that the river boats have not been that busy so I planned a route of boat and tube for this particular journey.  I strapped Sprog to me in the baby carrier and was pleasantly surprised by how relaxed the journey to work and back turned out to be.  We travelled in between the two rush hours so there were not that many work-folk about but there were not that many visitors either.  There were a lot of available seats on the boat and there were a lot of available seats on the tube, both ways.  We walked along the Victoria Embankment for a bit to transit between the boat and tube- there were not that many cars about.  In fact, there were fewer cars than normal (I have been driving into work with Sprog once every two weeks over the last four months, while on maternity leave, to keep in touch so I know the difference).

I had actually used the work trip to check out travel conditions as we had tickets for volleyball at Earl's Court one evening and wanted to know what it would be like to travel with Sprog to the event.  It seemed really easy so we decided to take public transport, using the tube all the way.  We got to the venue and home without any problems.  It will seem the Games organisers had transport around the city covered rather well- good job!

If anyone wants to visit Central London, they should make good use of the Olympic period as it is pleasantly relaxed in the city center.