It was a great feeling getting off the plane in London after a break of 22 years.
London has been at her best since our arrival, beautiful days, warm nights and clear blue skies.
We are all enjoying London immensely, after the heat and dirt of Bangkok, and the noise and High Rise of Hong Kong, London feels open, clean and ,friendly.
Until now we haven’t run into many western tourists, but that has all changed here, with tourists everywhere, and around the tourist sites the queues are long. Although seemingly numbers are not high, as we only had to wait 20mins to get on the London Eye, usually its twice that long!!
The London Eye is an amazing piece of engineering, with each of the 33 capsules holding 25 people, and taking 30 mins to go round the 150m high wheel. That’s a lot of $ coming in each hour.
We did an open top bus tour the first day to get our bearings and because it was such a lovely day. Quite by chance we came across a whole lot of the Queens horse guards milling about at Hyde Park corner - we found out they were getting ready to do a 41 gun salute for the Queens birthday so we followed them and got to watch that. Quite a sight in all their fancy uniforms. Vanessa of course loved the horses!
Another highlight of the week here in London was going to the Tower of London. We had a “Beefeater” show us around and tell us lots of gruesome stories of the many executions and torture that went on particularly in King Henry VIII’s era. The crown jewels were very impressive, two of the largest cut diamonds in the world. We got to watch a demonstration of a catapault being fired. We were staying in some apartments just on the other side of Tower Bridge so we walked past the Tower every day. London has developed the waterfront along the Thames a lot since we were last here and with the good weather it was getting well used.
We had a night at the theatre one night seeing Les Miserables - the longest running show in London - Vanessa and I thought it was fabulous, d*** thought it was OK and Liam slept through the second half.
We went to Madame Tussauds and I guess it was OK but it was very crowded. Got a few pics standing beside many famous people including Barack Obama.
Another highlight was going to St Pauls on Saturday for the ANZAC wreath laying service. A great way of getting into St Pauls for nothing. The Last Post was the best rendition I’ve ever heard. They sure know how to play a bugle over here! Lots of practice I guess!
d*** has bought us a car while we were in London - a Volvo station wagon - the kids have christened it Vladamir the Volvo because it’s built like a Russian tank! Hopefully it will have enough room for all our bags and camping gear for going off round Europe.
We are now off to Scotland to catch up with a few relatives before heading to Paris on May 11th.