What we found in London was better than Harry Potter
Karina Bland
We’d been talking about taking a trip to London for years, since I read the first Harry Potter book aloud to my son when he was 7.
We’d go to Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross Station, where the boy wizard boards the train for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the London Zoo's Reptile House, where Harry set loose a boa constrictor and learned he could talk to snakes.
We'd cross the Millennium Footbridge destroyed by Death Eaters in one movie and see for ourselves the real Leaky Cauldron pub and inn for wizards on the Muggle street of Charing Cross Road.
Sawyer lost interest in Harry Potter long before I did (I still like Harry Potter), but he was fascinated by Stonehenge, an ancient Neolithic monument just outside of London. He built a miniature version of it with river rocks in our backyard.
Then, he read about the Tower of London in school and devoured every Sherlock Holmes story on his own.
We would point out London landmarks in our favorite TV shows, “Doctor Who” and, of course, “Sherlock.”
Someday, we told each other, we would go there.
I’d put aside money toward the trip, but then something would happen. The transmission would go out in the car. The bathroom would flood.
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I’d check air fares fairly regularly, but a round trip for just one of us was more than my mortgage payment.
Maybe someday.
We went other places. We went to Washington, D.C., when Sawyer was 9. We camped at the Grand Canyon. In the last few years, we spent a week every summer at Mission Beach in San Diego. It was all wonderful.
It just wasn’t London.
My Aunt Jocelyn gave Sawyer a 10-pound note when she came to visit from New Zealand. She’s an avid traveler, sometimes for months at a time. She sent him another 10 pounds at Christmas.
Sawyer tucked the money in his dresser drawer. For someday.
Time slips away ...
The years went by, 10 of them.
And then one night, just after Christmas, Sawyer and I were standing at the grill out back, Sawyer holding the flashlight, me flipping tinfoil packets of salmon and asparagus.
Sawyer would graduate from high school soon. We were talking about his recent acceptance into the electrical engineering program at Arizona State University and how, if he could earn enough in scholarships, he wanted to live on campus.
He would be going away.
And I felt like I had run out of time.
I told him I was sorry that we never got to London.
“I’m not going away forever,” Sawyer said. “We still might go.”
Someday, I said. Someday, he said.
... or does it?
In January, I saw a story online that an airline was having a major sale. I quickly texted Sawyer at school, asking if he’d give up our beach vacation if there was a chance we could go to London.
He texted right back.
“Of course!”
Honestly, all these years later, without Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes, I had expected the idea of a mother-son trip would invoke the same terrified response that the words “matching family Christmas pajamas” did.
I clicked to buy two round-trip tickets to London for less than the regular price for one.
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"We're going!" I texted to Sawyer.
"WOOT!" he texted back.
Over the next six months, we poured over guidebooks and read reviews of bus tours online. We studied maps of the city, delighting in the oh-so-British names of streets: Crutched Friars, Cockpit Steps, Pudding Lane.
We made a must-list of things to see and do. We started saying "toilet" instead of "restroom." We dug out Aunt Jocelyn's pounds.
Finally, July arrived. We checked two small suitcases and boarded the plane, each of us carrying a backpack. It felt curiously light after years of travel with a Pack n’ Play, stroller, stuffed animals, coloring books, magnetic checkers and tiny Tupperware containers of goldfish-shaped crackers.
Hours later, we were in London, dropping our suitcases in a one-bedroom apartment near Tower Bridge that we had booked through Airbnb. From the little balcony, we could see the city skyline, including the Shard and the London Eye.
It was someday.
London swings like ... a tourist
We tried to do everything we'd talked about. We ate fish and chips in a pub, walked across Tower Bridge, toured the city from the top of a red, double-decker bus in the rain.
We picnicked on the side of the River Thames near a street musician, took the underground tube from one museum to another, hung on the gates outside Buckingham Palace to watch the Queen’s Guard.
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We went to the top of the Shard and underground to the Churchill War Rooms. We crossed the Millennium Bridge (no Death Eaters in sight) to St. Paul's Cathedral and toured Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, where we sat in on the first reading of King Lear.
We walked across London Bridge (theirs, not ours), through the Tower of London and along Baker Street to 221B.
We ate seafood paella for breakfast, meat pies for lunch, and bacon sandwiches from a street vendor on our way back from Trafalgar Square. We ate more fish and chips, at least once and sometimes twice a day.
The trip felt different than other vacations. The first few days we were with my friend Dawn and her son Jack, a year younger than Sawyer, before they headed to Switzerland. Then, we were on our own.
We explored this unfamiliar place together, on equal footing, taking turns with the map and deciding where we’d go next.
We talked while we walked, on tour buses and the tube, in pubs over pints of apple cider on draft.
'This is why we're here'
I love people watching when I’m on vacation, but I realized the person I watched the most on this trip, in this unfamiliar city, was my son.
I watched him study the tube map, hail a black cab and hold up two fingers when ordering seared scallops at Borough Market, pulling pounds from his wallet to pay for us both.
Sawyer tried local beers (the legal drinking age in England is 18), comparing London Glory to London Pride. He asked about food specials, watching the plates of the locals.
“This is why we’re here, right?” he said. To experience the culture. To try new things.
It was exactly why we were there.
I watched him flirt with a pretty waitress at Poppie’s Fish & Chips, disappear into a group of Australians outside a pub and strike up conversations with a Cyprus tailor across the street from the Sherlock Holmes Museum where he bought a new coat and a man outside a coffee shop who turned out to be theater producer James Tod.
I didn’t chide him when he ordered a second pint one night, nor did I tell him no when he came across a cigar shop outside Windsor Palace and decided he wanted to try a Cuban, like Churchill.
He starts college next month. I would not be there every moment.
Instead, I told him I hoped it would make him puke. (It didn’t, but it did trigger his asthma. “I don’t think smoking is for me,” Sawyer said later. I smiled, smugly.)
On this trip, I realized I was watching my son navigate the world like an adult.
(He even changed the toilet paper roll when it ran out in our Airbnb and took out the trash without being asked. Who was this person?)
Maybe he was acting like an adult because I was treating him like one.
I had known my son would grow into a man someday.
Maybe this was someday.
'Where should we go next?'
Maybe from here on out, Sawyer wouldn’t want to take vacations with his mom. Maybe he’ll want to spend spring break and long weekends with his friends. It’s what I did once I started college.
I was bummed because this vacation had been so much fun for me. He was a good travel companion. I felt like the adventure brought us closer.
As we boarded the plane to return to Phoenix, it felt like a last hurrah. Waiting at home were our regular lives, the roles we play, mother and son, cell phones and video games, back to work and an August dorm move-in date.
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I know now how fast the years can go by. Sawyer would graduate, get a job, a life of his own. I couldn’t imagine there would be any more vacations like this one, or a week at the beach or a weekend camping.
But when we buckled our seat belts, Sawyer turned and asked, “Where should we go next?”
He’d like to see Italy. I want to go to Greece. We agree that we’re due to make a trip to New Zealand, where my mother’s family lives. The last time we went Sawyer was 5.
Someday, he said. Someday, I said.
Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8614. Read more here.
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