London skyline and fold-up bikes

Ever since we abandoned Primrose in the "eleventh hour," we've been coursing through the veins, arteries, and capillarries of southwest London. Like platelets lost on their way to the "Heart and Hound" public house (known to us AmericANs as "a pub"), we navigate the streets, waterways, and rails of this imperial land. Primrose is a woman living near the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew where I, with Jessica's gracious and talented assistance, am finishing identifying plant specimens collected in Borneo. We had planned to rent some rooms from Primrose for the month of June, until 36 hours before arrival when my friend offered her house in Wimbledon (just a few miles, as the magpie flies, from Kew)... a free house, in the same corner of London as Kew, to share with two other freeloaders: Jen, a firefighter who, in her plight to reclaim a proper English garden in the back, has taken up snail harvesting and cuisine, and Collin, who does "this and that," commutes to Cornwall ("the tropical part of England") every weekend to spend time with his wife and two young kids as they prepare for their upcoming voyage from San Diego on thier recently acquired (via internet) 58 foot, 106 year-old sailboat that was, in fact, made in Cornwall. This bringing home of the sailboat, as it were, has earned worldwide media acclaim from "Boats 'n' Stuff" to "Ahoy! Quarterly."
If we had to title our English adventure in aliteration, it might be something like, "bikes, boats, and Burseraceae." We spent part of the weekend on Eel Pie Island (site of the writing of "The Wind and the Willows" and the Rolling Stones first acid trip). More importantly, however, on the far side of the island lies a fleet of ramshackle cargo ships, home to various potters, welders, bank robbers, and our friend Oliver, an earth-loving, Orchid painter and uber-enthusiast with a fleet of canoes, kayaks, and bicycle parts that he has hauled out of the river as they floated past his houseboat, freed from their owners by higher than normal tide.
Anyway, having travelled to and fro by train, bus, and Apache Canoe, on as many different routes as there are snails in the saucepan, we finally found "ReCycling," a funky bike shop, and bought the cheapest bikes available, which believe it or not, are among the first models of folding bikes ever made: Donkey Rocket and Rust Monkey (names resulting from endless iterations beginning with Pony Rocket and The Royal Promenade, respectively). Today we spent four hours on these cracked rubber wheels, non-stop pedalling the 8 miles each way to and from the herbarium, up and down cobblestone hills, alongside the highway, through massive Richmond Park passing hundreds of deer, along the gravel river path, looking more covetously than ever at all the other bikes on the road, exhilerated and exhausted on our creaky, wobbly trinkets. The work is going well, better described in person, because of the impersonations we would have to do of the botanists on the ground floor of Wing C, or the details of being blacklisted on the Grasses floor. Every day progress, plodding through the boxes of dried plant material, comparing Rungus plants to the existing collections, and getting closer to the truth. It's boring, tedious, frusterating, occasionally satisfying, and often funny.