Fri. 08-31-07 -- London, England
Originally published on: 09-03-07
We didn't sleep well last night so we decided to sleep through our 9am alarm clock. That meant by the time we finally got up, we had to rush to make it out to Buckingham Palace by 11:30 to catch the changing of the guard. We made it JUST at 11:30, and the festivities hadn't yet started. As we were waiting in the crowd, we soon realized that we apparently weren't waiting for the guards, but were waiting to get a glimpse of the queen as she left the Palace. After a short while, her motorcade passed by and we saw her (and Kara snapped a pic)!
After that we walked back to the tube station and rode to Waterloo to buy our train tickets to Paris. We got the tickets easy enough (£200 for both of us round trip), but as we were walking away we realized that we had accidentally bought return tickets from Paris when we needed tickets from Brussels! I kind of freaked out since they had sid the tickets were non-refundable, but then I played it cool and told them that we discovered a mistake that we needed to fix. We had to wait in line again, but we got it changed with no hassle. Shew!
After finishing our travel business, we hopped the tube to Westminster Pier and bought boat tickets to Tower Hill. The next boat left in about 7 minutes, so we got in line and boarded the ship. By now it was 1:30pm and we still hadn't had enough time to eat lunch, but lucky for us, there were tables on the inside of the boat. so, as we're cruising down the Thames, we made sandwiches from supplies we bought the day before. We ate our ham & cheese sandwiches, shared a strawberry yogurt, and snacked on some pretzel & cheese Combos that we bought in Chicago. After we finished lunch, we went to the top deck and enjoyed the rest of the cruise.
Once at Tower Hill, we bought our tickets and went to the Tower of London. A tour was starting less than 10 minutes after we got there so we waited at the entrance for it to start. The tour was lead by a Yeoman Warder (a Beefeater) and it was very enjoyable. The guide was pretty funny and there was a lot of interesting history. For example, hundreds of years ago there was a prophesy made that when the local ravens left the grounds, the white tower would fall and there would no longer be a king or queen. To make sure that doesn't happen, they actually keep ravens there and clip their wings so they can't fly away!
After the tour, we walked around the tower grounds for a while, and then got back on the tube to Lambeth North. From there we walked to the Imperial War Museum which we planned to t our through for about an hour (we got there at 5pm, it closed at 6pm). The entryway of the museum is VERY impressive! There is a huge covered area chockfull of war machines (tanks, boats, planes, bombs, rockets). We wanted to see the Holocaust Exhibit, so we went to it first. It turned out that we spent the whole hour walking through the sobering two floor exhibit.
Once the museum closed, we hopped the tube back home, had dinner, took showers, and now we're writing in our journals in the shared lounge. Tomorrow we hop the train to Paris!
