4 July 2015

Oy, what a day! We started out to get the tube to Leicester to pick up our London Pass, only to arrive at our stop, Bow Road, to find it closed. There was a worker guy there who told us to go a bit farther down the road to Mile End, and go from there… but it is on a different line. It was packed, and it ended up taking us over an hour because we had to change lines. Then we waited in line, got the passes, and had to change again to get to Tower Hill. By this time, we had been gone for a couple of hours, so we ate lunch at Costa before we entered the Tower of London.

We had a fun tour guide, who told us tons of fun stuff. What stuck with me was that yeoman warders are required to live in the Tower, but he has a four bedroom/two bathroom house in there and it's one hundred pounds a month. We stayed in the Tower quite a while, and saw everything but the crown jewels, as the line was crazy and we have technically seen them before. We got an ice cream cone, though it was pretty melty. All the British people were melty too, and complaining about the heat, but we thought it was quite nice most of the day… just got hot if you stood in the sun too long, or tried the tube ;). We happily discovered that we got a 10 percent discount in the souvenir shop with the London Pass.

After the Tower, we went to the Tower Bridge Exhibition, where we learned all about the bridge, along with a lot of other bridges around the world. The skywalk was really cool, and we had fun posing on it, though they were cleaning it at the time. We seem to be having a lot of bad timing in London: tube strike, line maintenance closure right where we are staying, etc. Anyhow, they told us that they were lifting the bridge at 17:15, so we hung around to watch that, and it was pretty cool. They sounds alarms, and clear the bridge, then up it goes while people cheer.

We decided to go up towards Trafalgar Square and see the sites there, and Gabe wanted to take a bus - the tube kind of freaked him out today; with the closures, it was super crowded, and we got stuck there for ages this morning. We found a bus that said Trafalgar Square, so we hopped on one - totally lucked out since we have no bus map. It was hot up there, but we got to see a couple of things we would not have seen otherwise, like the fire monument, and St. Paul's Cathedral.

We got off and decided we might find a better restaurant a block or two away from the square. The first one we tried to go in did not allow kids, but the doorman told us the one catty corner allowed kids, and we could eat upstairs in the dining room, so we went there. Toria and I entered first, and we didn't know that Gabe got stopped at the door, because the bottom floor is a bar, while the upstairs is a pub/restaurant. So, we were confused when they didn't turn up! We went back outside, and the doorman told us they went upstairs, but for some reason HE was confused that Toria is my daughter. Who knows? It was a decent meal - two fish and chips, one steak pie, and one burger. Pretty heavy stuff.

After dinner, we walked around Trafalgar Square, and saw a couple of street performers. Gabe climbed the lions, while the rest of us declined. All the tourists had fun taking pictures of each other and chatting. Then we walked through the Admiralty Arch, by St. James' Park and Palace, to Buckingham Palace. They would not let us in! Nor did they come out on the balcony to greet us! We sorted out which tube got us closest to our station with the closures, and headed back to the tube. We stopped at a couple of cheesy souvenir shops along the way.

Everyone is tired! We are already halfway through the trip… on one hand it is flying by, yet on the other it feels like Paris was ages ago. Tomorrow we plan to go to Greenwich, then probably split up, with half of us seeing Chelsea Stadium and the other half Kensington Palace. We got to hear some fireworks tonight, which we assume was for the 4th of July.