Millenium Pier

There are FIVE piers named Millenium Pier in London.

May 23, 2024, on foot, I visited each one of them in succession without knowing their names.

I was in search of a Thames River cruise bought and paid for but never found by one solo-traveling American playing tourist over a long weekend. That cruise, purchased in a late-night shopping spree on-line from the comfort and familiarity of my home office in Connecticut, departed from one ‘Millenium Pier’

In my jetlagged and almost disassociated state, I remembered snippets of past-time. I walked around the center of London, from the Embankment Tube exit at the river’s edge, down parallel with the Thames, across the Southbank bridge to the Southbank, down the whole of the Southbank past the National Theater and more food vendors than ever I remembered, and across the Westminster Bridge to Big Ben. And back. Places I had been before, wide-eyed and younger, in 1985 and 1999.

As I was an hour early for the planned departure, I could get there, just ‘up ahead’. Yes, calls to the tour operator went to voicemail. Passers by told me to “walk over there Ma’am”.

One Londoner turned to her friend and said that she was trying to help “that older woman” with directions; I looked around forgeting that ‘older woman’ was me. After all, I still felt every bit the 19 or 33 year old that had walked those paths before.

Never did I think that five places could bear the same name. Never did I think that the vendor of said tourist encounter could have failed to identify the right departure point or that he would not have remembered that several locations used the same moniker. 

The journey was worthy, even if the ship sailed without that ‘older woman’ too damn self-reliant to see that some destinations can’t be reached, not for lack of effort, but because they were not precisely described. And perhaps the wisdom of that ‘older woman says And, that’s ok.