London!!

Since I took over 600 pictures on my trip to the UK, I'm going to post just a few. We spent our first 3 days in London, and here's a quick synopsis (for the rest of the London pictures and their descriptions, please click here)

We landed at Heathrow at 8:30, took the train to London, and then took the tube to the Kings Cross Station. Our hotel (the Montana Excel)was about 200 yards from the station, which made it a great place for touring London!

After we got settled in our room, we took off walking...and we ended up at the British Museum:

The Elgin Marbles The Sutton Hoo Helmet
The next day, we took the tube (Mind the Gap!!) to the Tower Hill Station.

Tower Bridge

and we visited the Tower of London

Traitor's Gate

one of the Tower Ravens

We did a lot of wandering around - we would often cut down an alley, just to see what was there. We saw some pretty interesting things that way, such as the ruins of Winchester Palace:

(I took the picture because it intrigued me, and Dad did the research from home to find out what it was!)

We visited St. Paul's Cathedral, even though I'm not a fan of Christopher Wren (the man destroyed a lot of medieval architecture in his day)

I sat on the steps, because that's what everybody does. :-)

We saw Big Ben

(Jackie, it was 2:04 when I took this picture - and I didn't even have a watch!) :-)

We took the train to Windsor:

arrow slits at Windsor Castle

and visited St. George's Chapel

I was really disappointed, though - just as I was getting to the choir (where Henry VIII is buried in the floor), they closed it to the public for a funeral.

We walked to Buckingham Palace

and then we visited the Jewel Tower

stone boss in the ceiling of the Jewel Tower

(yes, we saw the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London. Since the "real" crown jewels were melted down during the Commonwealth, nothing at the Tower was older than the mid-17th century. The ones at the Tower were okay, I guess)

We visited Westminster Abbey

and I got to touch the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer (and I got a peek at the tomb of Edward the Confessor - the one who started the whole mess that led to the Battle of Hastings!!)

I took a lot of pictures of stone bosses, gargoyles, and grotesques

(these are about 40 feet up on the back of the abbey) before we left London, I took a picture from out hotel window. This was taken at 4:30 am (yes, that's 4:30 in the morning!!) It didn't get fully dark until almost 11:00 at night, either...

I'll try to get more pictures up from the rest of our trip later this weekend!