Monument Legs

To bundle up a few Monopoly streets together, we ended up doing a fairly long walk. The total distance as calculated by Google maps is 8.5kms (here's a route, though probably not the one we took, because we got lost a few times). That doesn't include walking around the Tower of London, and going to the post office to post the postcard for MrFodder's grandparents.

Monument (to the Great Fire of London) was the second last thing we did, and it was a bit crazy.

We were pretty tired by then, having spent most of the day walking, but I wanted to get that certificate, so I suggested we go up the stairs. All 311 of them.

This is a photo from about a 1/4 of the way up the steps, and you can't even see the steps at the top from here.

We took a few breaks going up, and luckily it wasn't very crowded (probably around 3pm?), as the stairs near the top are quite narrow, and so only one person would be able to go up at a time, which meant if anyone was coming down, we'd have to walk back down to let them past us. We did make it all the way to the top, and we got our certificates on the way down (so I'm guessing all you need to do is pay £4, walk in, and walk back out without going up the stairs).

In hindsight, it feels a little crazy that we did so much walking. Monument wasn't even our last stop, we also walked to Fleet St, which was not too bad, and we found a lolly shop that sold Jolly Ranchers so MrFodder was happy. But it did set the pace for the rest of our trip.

We obviously did a lot of walking after London, and whenever we felt like our strength was flagging, one of us would say, "Monument legs!" and it would conjure up the memory of having walked so far, and still made it all the way up Monument. If we could do that, then we could walk up whatever hill we had to walk up to get wherever we were going.

So I'm glad we went to London first, because if it hadn't been for Monument legs, we probably wouldn't have done as much walking as we did.