London: Another Whirlwind Through the City

Your mom and I were slowly getting acclimated to the time zone, so it was another early morning, but we slept like babies the night before and were ready for another touristy day in the city. This time we saw a lot of the Western London attractions.

First things first. In our neighborhood was this cute little creperie operated by a man with the most charming French accent. We chowed down knowing we had a lot of touring to do! 

As we got more and more familiar with the different train lines, we started to sense the different "personality" each line had. Different trains, different people, different locations all made each line pretty distinct from each other.

We rode to the Piccadilly Circus station and got off without much of a plan except to soak up the scene. 

We couldn't get enough of the architectural marvels, like this long, curved street of stone buildings.

We headed to Trafalgar Square, one of the many beating hearts of the city.

At the north end of the square was the massive and beautiful National Gallery. We were a bit too early to go in, so we kept wandering around to see what else we could see before it opened.

Nearby was a huge traffic circle, the center of tons of professional and government offices. I could hardly believe how long this line of classic red London double-decker buses was waiting in traffic. 

We made our way to the beautiful Admiralty Arch, the entrance to The Mall, which headed straight to Buckingham Palace. 

On our way to the Palace we enjoyed a stroll around nearby Saint James Park, where we stumbled upon this aged rebel disregarding the "don't feed the wildlife" signs, looking dapper all the while.

This is as close as we got to Buckingham Palace, but it was cool to get a glimpse. 

We made our way back through the park and towards the Thames, straight into Parliament Square. Of course Big Ben just helped it sink in more that we'd finally made it to London!

Again, we decided not to wait half the day in a line to get inside, but we got a great look at the gorgeous exterior of Westminster Abbey, one of the most ornate buildings in all of London.

One well used feature of the city were these racks of Barclays Bikes. Barclays is an English bank, and they sponsored these rental bikes which you could often see both tourists and locals riding around on from one rack to the next to save a little time.

We crossed the Thames and got some amazing views of the city as we strolled along the river. There were tourists everywhere! Mostly, they were made up of families and lots of European student groups, particularly groups of French students. 

We made it back to Trafalgar Square after a big loop and a few miles of walking, finally to get inside the National Gallery. We respected the "no photography" rule but it was hard with all the gorgeous works of classic art from mostly European artists over the last 500 years.

After a while exploring the gallery, we made our way back south to see the epic London Eye, deciding finally that we'd eventually get on, but it'd have to wait for another day. 

We looped back to Saint James Park to see the lake inside and relax a little bit after all of our walking. 

Unexpectedly we heard some marching band playing in the distance and noticed they were headed our way! After asking around, we learned that they were rehearsing for a big parade coming up a couple days later to celebrate the birthday of one of the royal family.

We followed the parade route for a while to see where it'd end up, leading us to the other side of Buckingham Palace. The marching had a very "old world" feel to it. Very regimented and militaristic. 

The long Mall heading towards the Palace.

Every turn it seemed had a majestic monument to some person or even significant to English history. One thing about this town compared to the American cities we've explored is that its history is just so much longer. In fact, many hundreds of years longer, and quite storied, so the significant people and places are everywhere!

We hadn't had our fill of art, yet, so we headed to the National Portrait Gallery, which featured a mixture of classic and modern paintings - all portraits - of more influential British folks.

We ended our long day in Leicester (pronounced "Lester" for some reason) Square, with a couple of pints and some interesting people watching. Your mom spotted a celebrity wandering around, one of the stars from a TV show she'd been following at the time. With another epic and touristy day in the books, we could hardly believe we still had twelve days to go!