My last full day in London and I get to spend it with my brother! Michael is here to do research but today is a bank holiday and every place he needs to go is closed so he’s at my disposal.

First on my list was the Leonardo Da Vinci show on at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. Like Rembrandt this is a big anniversary year for Leonardo, 500 years since his death, and Britain is having a big exhibition of his drawings. The Queen owns the most drawings in private hands and over the last 6 months a hundred or so have been shown at 6 national museums around the country. Now they’re all back in London and they’ve added another hundred to the display so it’s really a once in a lifetime opportunity to enjoy his genius.

Afterwards we navigated through the crowd of finishers of a 10k foot race right outside Buckingham Palace, and wound our way up through St. James’ Park to the Royal Academy of Arts to see another exhibition on “The Renaissance Nude”, in drawing, painting and sculpture. The Renaissance (and pre-Renaissance) is my favorite era in art so I was very pleased we found this show.

Lunch was needed next so we found a nearby pub to share a burger, then off to yet another museum – the National Gallery. I was there last August but unable to walk too far at that time so I had to skip all the early art so today we started at the 1300’s and worked our way up through the centuries.

By then it was definitely tea time so we popped across the street to sip a cuppa underground at St. Martins-In-The-Field crypt, and fortuitously discovered an orchestral rehearsal upstairs in the church afterwards. There’s a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons tonight so this must have been a last-minute practice session for it.

The day was coming full circle as we strolled back through St. James’ Park towards Victoria Palace Theatre. I had a 7:30pm performance of Hamilton to see so after much menu reading we found a suitable restaurant for a fast dinner for me (Michael enjoyed a coffee and my dessert) and I rushed off to find my place in line at the theatre.

Tomorrow I fly back to the Desert and my Spring adventures come to an end.