October 3, 2015

We are here in London and having a fabulous time!  We spent the first day with our friend, Amy, that we met in Africa.  It was great to catch up and we had a fantastic day walking around the city and seeing some of the sights.  We went to Buckingham Palace and got there just in time to catch the tail end of the changing of the guard…holy cow…what a mad rush of people!  There were TONS of people there and you could hardly move.  We did manage to see some of the guards and we eventually got pictures of the gates/palace/etc.  Unfortunately, the palace is not open to the public, so we didn’t get to go in, but that was fine with us.

From the palace, we walked down to Harrods, (super fancy store) and got some lunch to take and eat in the park.  Harrods has a really great food court with about every type of food you could want.  For being such a nice store (and an expensive city), it was pretty reasonably priced.  We took our food and went to sit in Hyde Park since it was such a nice, sunny day.  We had a good time, and Hayden even got to check out the swans, ducks, and pigeons

From lunch, we walked around town a little more and made our way to Piccadilly Circus and to Trafalgar Square.  Everything was decorated NFL for the Jets – Dolphins game on Sunday…it was pretty cool.

We got some good pictures of Big Ben and the London Eye at both day and night.  I like the comparative pictures…London really is a beautiful city!

The next morning, we went to see Westminster Abbey…WOW…super cool place!  The building itself is so neat, but when you think that it is almost 1,000 years old and here about all of the history, it is really amazing.  There are no pictures permitted inside, but it was beautiful.  It was built over hundreds of years by different monarchs, but they managed to keep the style the same, so it looks like it was all built at once.  Definitely a place that everyone should visit!

After the Abbey, we went to the Jewel Tower, which we thought would have jewels.  It is the oldest remaining portion of the original Westminster, but we were disappointed to find that there were no jewels, that’s just the name of the castle.

We walked around a bit more and saw some more cool stuff…here is Hayden with the horse guard.