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I don't know about everyone else, but when I woke up I felt like I'd been rubbed backwards through a sieve. Nothing a shower and some breakfast (comprising bread rolls and vacuum-packed sachets of jam) couldn't sort out, though.
After a lengthy bill-paying procedure (some weeks later, a highly complex spreadsheet was still circulating amongst the members of the group in order to level out costs) we made for the town centre to check the times of the Postbus, and to visit – at last – the museum they're all talking about.
The world-renowned Briefmarkenmuseum contains 1 (one) room in total. However, don't let that put you off – the space-saving use of cabinets with pull-out "leaves" for displaying the stamps makes this a philatelist's paradise. (I'm told that philately is legal in some parts of Liechtenstein.) The stamp sub-committee of the London Men's Self-Help Pub Crawl Group were in their element, as these pictures of a fascinated Pad and Simon reveal.
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The museum contains every stamp ever issued in Liechtenstein (or something like that), which is evidently a lot. Anyway, after we'd finished checking them out we had a final meander around, and came across a gift shop selling a selection of tawdry plastic Alpenhorns and cowbells. With this website in mind, I decided we should try to capture the sounds of Liechtenstein using the MEMO TO SELF recording facility on my mobile phone. I managed to transfer this to an almost audible MP3 for your enjoyment, so that you can get a flavour of what the principality is all about.
Following that piece of inspired ethnomusicology, the Postbus arrived and we started the journey back. This all went smoothly, except for when Simon managed to lose the return portion of his train ticket. This required a long period of emptying pockets, rifling through bags, etc., which all comes under the general heading of "faff". Luckily the ticket collector was very calm, and it is to her credit that she didn't explode with rage after he eventually found the ticket in his wallet, where he had first looked.
I think most of us enjoyed a few light beers during the trip back – after all, it was a public holiday the next day – and we all decided that we should get the train back from Luton to St Pancras (rather than the nearby King's Cross Thameslink, where we'd started out from) in order to finish our journey at the Shires, which is the St Pancras equivalent of Cooper's. Weary but proud, at about 5.30 p.m., we got a passing tourist to take a photograph of our triumphant homecoming outside this truly horrendous pub.
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To Ian's chagrin, the tourist in question somehow managed to break his camera, although not sufficiently badly to expose the film. I think Simon and Ian then headed home in their separate ways, while Tim, Pad, Al and I enjoyed a well-earned round of scrumpy in the Shires. Indeed, Pad and I subsequently decided to drink on in Mabel's Tavern and various other establishments in the area, before rounding the night off with an inevitable curry. These actions caused Tim to later accuse us of having "pressed self-destruct".
So, the end of another crawl. I know this wasn't up to the standard of our other write-ups like L2K and T2K, for which I apologise, but if I hadn't posted something, I fear I may have been rubbed out by the other members of the group. Anyway, "I promise I'll make it up to you on the next one", as they say. In the meantime, check back soon (i.e. within about ten years) for the next update, which will be Stationlink (and I still have to do Vilnius after that), check out some of the links from our front page, and of course don't forget to sign our guestbook.