England Trip: Day 4

Okay so I am a couple days behind in blogging about our trip. The last couple days were crazy!

Day 4, Tuesday, was our first day exploring London. We got up early, again, to catch an 8am tour bus for a city tour. The tour bus was okay. It was basically hop on an off privileges for 24 hours. Then you could plug headphones in for commentary about the city. At first the bus was frustrating because people walking were moving faster than the bus was in traffic.

So, we got on in Trefalger Square and hopped off at the Tower of London. I thought the Tower of London was a tower, it is more of a fortress. Instead of waiting for the next tour to start we decided to take the Medieval wall walk which goes through all of the outer towers; including the Salt tower a place where people were imprisoned. Then we went to look at the crown jewels in the Jewel House and to look at arms and armor in the White Tower. Lastly we went through the bloody tower to see instruments of torture...

When we got out we saw the changing of the guard there. Then it was time to move on. It was a toss up between taking a river cruise down the Thames or walking back to St. Pauls Cathedral and touring that. We went back to St. Paul's. Grabbing lunch at Pret Manger (a great sandwhich shop that has a billion locations in London).

The walk was nice but long and gave us a good taste for London City Proper. St Paul's Cathedral was beautiful. We decided to take a walk up to the top of the dome. The stairs got a bit scary for me being see through, skinny, spindly, and shaky. Oh and there were 390 of them. But the view up on top of St. Paul was absolutely amazing. Even if I did spend most of it pressed against the wall (I just don't like heights that much). Definitely a awesome thing to try if you can stomach the walk up there. I am happy we did it, even if my knee still hasn't forgiven me.

After that we caught the underground over to Westminister Abbey and decided to cross the bridge to ride the London Eye. We got excellent view of Big Ben and the amazing Houses of Parliament on the way over to the London Eye. There was a bit of a wait (Seemed like there were hundreds of French school groups in London) but we got to ride the eye. It was awesome for 10 minutes, but then kind of boring. If gives you some great views of London, but takes 30 minutes to complete a circuit). The last 15 minutes were spent admiring the marvel of engineering that went into building the eye so that the riding pods always stay on the outside.

Then we caught the tour bus again and rode to Harrods. Harrods was amazing and is like a city all into itself. They had a pet store, sushi bar, toy store, miles of candy, clothing. You name it. Very cool.

After that we had dinner at the Gran Cafe across the street and hopped back on the tour bus to take it to its end. Well it didn't end where we thought and we ended up in the Picadilly area. This was kind of cool lots of nightclubs, casinos, bright lights and huge digital screens. Pretty dazzling in the dark, it was fun to see. Then we found an underground station and went home. We were trying to get to bed early since for Day 5 we needed to get up at 3am to go to Paris.

Overall we saw a lot of excellent things, got a good feel for London and went to bed with sore legs from our hike up to the top of St. Paul.