Under the Thames

50 feet below the surface of the River Thames

I like to visit oddball attractions when we travel. London is no exception. That's how my family came to find ourselves taking a walk under the Thames. Sure, some people head straight for Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London. Not us. On our first full day in this historic town, our first stop was the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

Close Encounters on Devils Tower

Two men loom large in my mind when I think of Devils Tower — Richard Dreyfus and Frank Sanders. Steven Spielburg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind was one of the hit movies that came out in 1977. (A little cult classic called Star Wars was another.) I watched it in the theater during some friend's birthday sleepover party and spent the rest of the night decade worrying that I'd be abducted by aliens. I clearly remember spreading out my sleeping bag under my friend's baby grand piano in hopes that it would offer a small measure of protection in the event of an extra-terrestrial visitation. Richard Dreyfus' character briefly encounters a UFO and is then strangely compelled to keep building models of an unusual, mountain-like image he sees in his mind. An iconic scene occurs at the dinner table when he heaps mashed potatoes onto his plate as his puzzled family looks on, then sculpts the mound with his fork.