What we did in London...

This morning I had planned for us to catch the 9:40am train from Penzance to Bristol.  However as we were up early, we decided we could make the 8:28am instead.  Both of these trains went straight through to Bristol without having to change.  So I am writing this now and will post it later.  The weather today is quite overcast, not like the beautiful day we had yesterday.  But after all it is November 5^th, so I don’t suppose we can expect the good weather to last forever.  At the moment I am trying to watch the scenery as well as type.

I have left a few gaps in my blog writing so plan to do a bit of catch up.  I am a very slow typist.  I chose to study science not typing at school and in spite of a couple of attempts to learn to touch type, I really just muddle along!

As we only planned to spend two nights in London, I found deciding what to see a bit overwhelming.  Our full day was a week day (Friday), which had advantages and disadvantages – there were a lot of visitors where we were.  Although there seemed to be a lot of families out and about the next day when we went to Kensington Gardens.  Actually a couple of people mentioned that it was half term break – not sure whether that made any difference.  Before we arrived, I had decided that I wanted to go on the London Eye and a cruise on the Thames, so we had booked these online and just had to pick up the tickets.  I had already had an aerial view of London.  For most of our flight from Stockholm on Thursday evening, I was thinking that having a window seat was not very useful as it was dark and cloudy.  However as we approached Heathrow, the clouds cleared and I had a wonderful view of the lights of London.  Although unfortunately I really had no idea what in particular I was looking at!

However, back to Friday morning.  After purchasing our Oyster cards, we caught the tube from Paddington to Waterloo and walked to the London Eye.  We did the cruise first – it was trying to drizzle, but not really enough to worry about.  We went slightly upstream and turned in front of the Houses of Parliament, then went downstream to just past Tower Bridge before returning to the base of the London Eye.

There was quite a long queue for the London Eye when we alighted from the cruise, but it didn’t take all that long until we were on board.  It had stopped drizzling but was very overcast which meant that we didn’t get views into the distance, but I thought it was still fun.  The London Eye is a variation on what Anna thinks is my obsession with revolving restaurants – she said she had never been to a revolving restaurant until we went to the US and Canada!

By the time we bought some lunch from a nearby Street Food Festival, it was raining quite hard which put a bit of a dampener on things.  We found some shelter under which to eat our lunch, before we ventured across the Millennium Bridge.  We caught the tube to Piccadilly Circus from where we walked to Trafalgar Square.  It had fortunately stopped raining by this stage!

We ended up walking along The Mall and through St James’s Park to Buckingham Palace.  I loved St James’s Park.

After Buckingham Palace, we bought a few souvenirs in Buckingham Palace Road before catching the tube back to Paddington.

I know there were lots of places we didn’t visit, but it is hard to do everything in one day, especially when it is raining for part of the time!  However I was happy with what we did.