A Day in the Life: London Adventure #1

On Saturday we decided to make a day trip to London. We made this decision about 2 hours before we went to bed the night before and it took us forever to decide what we wanted to see. There are so many beautiful things that we both wanted to see so we narrowed it down to Picadilly Circus, St. James Park, Westminster Abbey, and Big Ben. We figured we would start at Picadilly Circus figuring that it was the furthest North of the things we wanted to see. Then we would just walk our way south. So we took the tube to Picadilly Circus, which for those of you that don’t know it is supposed to be their version of Times Square. It’s cool, tons of places to shop but that wasn’t why we were there so we got bored… fast. We walked to where we thought we needed to go and ended up in front of The National Gallery. It is an art museum that has free admission so we ventured in and looked around for some of the names we knew. I really wanted to see Monet because I love Monet. All Rob wanted to do was find a painting that he recognized as being famous. Well we when we finally found Monet, Rob found his famous painting. It is called the Water Lily Pond.

From the gallery we realized we were in Trafalgar Square, which is the heart of London and one of the more famous tourist spots in London. Most of it was blocked off for some kind of competition I only got about one good picture so we will have to venture back sometime. After we sat down and figured out where we needed to go, we headed towards St. James Park. This park is known for its views of the Palace and I couldn’t wait to see the Palace. We ate lunch in the park, which was a disaster as I am afraid of bees and have a huge bird phobia. So after our traumatizing lunch we headed to a gorgeous building that doesn’t even look real in our pictures. It was called the Horse Guards Parade. There were still soldiers there, two were on horses and that’s what they do for 24 hours a day. After seeing this we headed to the other side of the park over to see the palace. On our way to the other side of the park we walked along the lake, which is in the middle, and apparently it is where everyone goes to feed birds. There were geese, ducks, pigeons, and then this huge bird that was easily taller than me. Rob was very interested in this bird so I made him go pet it so I could get a picture. Everyone was petting it and I was hiding behind other people. We finally made it to the other side of the park and saw the Queen Victoria Memorial; it is located directly in front of the Palace and all of its gold gates. We missed the changing of guards by many hours. It was very cool to see and it takes your breath away. Once we were finished taking in the awe that is Buckingham Palace we headed to Westminster Abbey. I really wanted to see Westminster and it is just as incredible as I though it would be. We got there late so the inside was closed so we are planning another visit. Its gorgeous and there are sculptures of 20^th Century martyrs. From the front of the Abbey if you look slightly to you left you will see Big Ben, or what we called our next destination. Big Ben is a part of the parliament building but individually its beautiful but when you see the whole of the parliament building you are amazed at how huge it really is. Big Ben and parliament are located right on the Thames so we crossed the bridge so we could try and get a picture of the whole building. After we saw Big Ben and parliament we were exhausted and we jumped on the tube and headed home.