New Year's Day in Richmond Park

This time we checked far in advance to make sure that there was going to be public transportation on new year's day (we didn't want a repeat of our Christmas-day shock) before heading to the beautiful, ramshackle, incredibly varied landscapes of Richmond Park, a park in southwest London that is 2.5 times the size of Vancouver's Stanley Park and three times the size of New York's Central Park. I expected a park of that size to offer up a variety of sights, but Richmond Park still surprised me. This is what we saw when we entered the park near its southern tip:

trees in all their gnarled, dramatic glory. There were also plenty of great dogs wandering around.But we weren't just enthralled with how the park looked when we entered it; the most interesting sensory aspect was how it sounded. The air was filled with the most intense squawking of birds, and when we stared into the treetops, we saw them everywhere.
The sound of water was soothing in places, and we walked across grand vistas of grassland which didn't provide much shelter from the chilly wind, but were pretty regardless.
But those of you who read my Christmas-day post may remember that one of the reasons I wanted to go to Richmond Park was to see some of the deer that graze there. After quite a long time walking in the park, we still hadn't seen any deer and decided to head toward the road and exit the park. "Wait," said Bob, "are . . . those . . . deer?" When we got closer, we couldn't believe that we hadn't seen them immediately, but the grass had expertly camouflaged a substantial number of Red deer right between us and the road:
Just when I began heading over to the road, Bob said, "Wait, aren't those more deer?" and sure enough, a group of Roe deer had quietly gathered behind us.
Some of the views we encountered were lovely,
and some were surreal. From the highest point in the park, we took a peek through this telescope set up near King Henry VIII's burial mound, and through the cutout of foliage, we saw a view that Londoners have been able to see on and off for the last 300 years . . .
. . . St. Paul's Cathedral, more than 16 km away! Apologies for the fuzzy, off-centre photo, but please remember that this is a digital pic of what I saw through a telescope, and I'm just pleased that St. Paul's got in the shot, considering I had to balance the telescope, aim the camera without being able to see exactly where I was aiming, try to control the "macro" setting on the camera, and hold my breath so as to minimize any camera vibration--all at the same time!

Now, I thought that this was more than enough views for the day, but Bob sought out one more view in Richmond Hill, just near where we exited the park. Here he is, gazing fondly upon the home of his longtime idol:
Our walk wasn't all flora, fauna, and rock stars, though.
I appreciate the shaming tactic of this sign, but am extremely doubtful that it does any good. One of the annoying aspects of daily London life, no matter what neighbourhood we're in, even if we don't see any dogs anywhere, is that there is dog poo all over London sidewalks, streets, and green spaces. We're not really sure what can be done, but for now, we're just spending a bit of time watching where we're stepping.

Heading home from Richmond, we noticed some wonderful artwork in a tube station just as the doors were closing, and resolved to get back to that station before the temporary exhibit closes later this month.
The artwork we saw nicely fit in with our rural/surreal theme of the day and all in all, I think we did pretty well on our new year's day "country" outing!