Basically, my original idea was to walk to the Italian Gardens, then follow the Long Water and Serpentine to Park Lane and from there to Marble Arch. This started out OK and I got some pictures of some nice-looking little birds (I think another species of coot, but I'm not 100% sure)
Later
timill tells me these are moorhens, which are close relatives of the coots.
After that I wanted to see the big statue from my last park post from the other bank of the Long Water and if possible find out who it is by - unfortunately it turned out that there was no information there. What I did find there was a heron, which someone began to feed, so it came quite close to the path.
I carried on, but when I took the tunnel under the road into Hyde Park I found that the bank was closed after 50 yards or so - a big chunk of the park is still closed off due to the Olympics, which made it impossible to continue around the water. So I decided to cut my losses and head towards Marble Arch, had a nice lunch, and headed home.
On the way back I decided to take a look at the new Paddington Station booking hall on the canal bank, and ended up taking a train home - probably quicker to walk, but I wanted to get some pictures of the Crossrail support machinery from the station platform at Royal Oak. This is a massive system of conveyor belts, gizmos to extract fluid from the spoil, etc. that is several hundred yards long, extending from the tunnel entrance opposite my house to just east of the station. I could only get pictures of the eastern part.
First, a panorama stitched from several pictures
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crossrail_conveyer_system.JPG
Second, a detail of this machinery, not quite sure what this does but I think it extracts fluid from the spoil.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crossrail_Conveyer_system_detail.JPG
So, not quite the day I had planned, but worthwhile.
