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.