Europe Trip: England

In honor of my Mama, it's her birthday today (two days ago, it took me longer than expected to get this post finished) and she served her mission in England (as did my Papa), 

today I'll post about England.

We had a lot of fun in England and did a TON of walking.

The first day we did another walking tour from our guide books.

It started out with one of London's most famous landmarks,

Big Ben (which actually is just the bell in the tower).

 We were going to go to Westminster Abbey that day, but for some reason it was closed.

So we went to the Royal Calvary Museum instead.

At one point in the museum they have uniforms you can try on...

so we tried... they didn't fit well...lol

 Our next stop were the Churchill War Rooms,

they were pretty awesome!

This is where Churchill was during WWII.

It was pretty neat.

 Close by that was The Institute of Mechanical Engineers,

that's what the building behind my sweet husband is, 

sorry you can't really see the writing on the building

 Our walk ended at Trafalgar Square.

We were pretty tired by that point, so this was our picture.. lol!

 But I convinced my sweet husband to stand up for a picture before we left.

That night we went to Wicked!

We saw it the night we got engaged and loved it,

so it was fun to see it again.

 We were pretty high up, but it was still great!

We were on the second row from the top... lol!

A couple days later we saw The Lion King.

It was amazing! The costumes were SO cool and so was the set!

Right after the Circle of Life they closed the curtains and turned on the lights and said that there was some technical difficulty with the stage.

I was so afraid they were going to tell us that the show was canceled for the night,

I mean, they had just sucked us in with an amazing opening song!

But thankfully, they worked on it for a bit and then were able to fix it and continue with the show.

Phwew!

The next day we started off at Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

 Or at least a replica of the Globe, since the original burned down and was located 200 yards away from where this one is located.

 After our tour we walked the 200 yards to the original location.

They have a little monument on the ground showing where the Globe was.

My sweet husband is reading the sign.

The shiny spots on the ground are the monument. 

 Our next stop was the Tower of London.

 We climbed to the top of the tower.

 Someone told me that there was a zoo at the tower at one point,

so we are guessing that is why there are animals there.

But it was really cool, these animals were made out of chicken wire.

 I especially liked the elephant, probably because I made make a mean elephant noise... lol

But that's a story for another day.

 Of course after the Tower of London,

we saw the Tower Bridge.

Which is often confused with the London Bridge,

this isn't the London Bridge, that bridge is actually not that cool.

Here we are on the bridge walking to the museum.

 In the museum they had these statues in memory of the workers of the Tower Bridge.

 This is on the bridge.

 After the Tower Bridge, we went to the HMS Belfast,

an old naval ship.

It was in the battle of D-Day.

My sweet husband was in heaven.

We only had an hour before it closed, so we had to hurry a bit.

But I think we saw everything!

 We wanted to go to a show that night, but were unable to get tickets,

so we went to Piccadilly Circus to see what it was like at night.

And to get dinner.

I think we walked around for about an hour trying to decide what to eat

 Finally we settled on this place.

 Oh my goodness. It did not disappoint!

It was super tasty!

And it had really cool bathrooms, but I didn't take a picture of them, sorry.

 This is a picture of the escalators going to the tubes.

It was SO far down! 

The next day we saw Westminster Abbey

 It was beautiful; however, you can't take pictures in there, so we don't have too many. Sorry.

  Then we saw St. Paul's Cathedral

It was also beautiful, but you can't take pictures inside it either;

however, you can take pictures on the top of the dome because you are outside.

So that's what we did.

 A view of the Millennial Bridge from St. Paul's Cathedral 

 Then we walked to Buckingham Palace,

sadly we didn't see the queen or the changing of the guard, apparently it was the day before..

 After that we walked through this pretty garden/park

 This tree reminded me of the Prince and Me when he proposes..

 Our walk through the garden took us to the Thames (pronounced Tems, silly British) River where we took a river cruise to Greenwich.

 My sweet husband was a little disappointed that his phone's GPS was off by about 300 feet,

but later he found something that said that GPSs use different zero longitude reference point, that is about 300 feet off from the Prime Meridian. 

 We were in two places at once, just like Jamie on A Walk to Remember...

 The next day we went on a tour of Stonehenge and Bath

 Stonehenge was neat to see; however, I think the audio tour was overkill.

They had us stop about 12 times,

but every time the audio tour basically said

"No one really knows why they built Stonehenge or what it was used for"

over and over. It was pretty entertaining.

One of the points did say that on certain days the sun hits one of the rocks just right and it's pretty neat.

I believe it was on one of the solstices.

 This is the view of it when you walk up to the first "stopping point" by the monument.

 Man, he's handsome.

He told me this picture looks photoshopped. But I promise, it's the real deal.

 I think our tour had it just right, we were at Stonehenge for about an hour, probably less.

Then we headed over to Bath,

which is a beautiful little city made up of buildings all made out of Bath Stone.

Also, it is home to some Roman Baths.

Bath has a natural warm spring that the Romans used to make big baths.

Apparently, Bath was a resort destination of sorts back then (and now).

It lost some of its hype for a while, but then one of the queens who was battling infertility bathed in the waters of Bath and within 10 months had a child. So it quickly regained its former glory.
Also, it's where Jane Austin is from.

 It also had an audio tour, but it was a bit more informative... lol.

 As tempting as it was to bathe in the waters in hopes of curing our infertility,

we resisted... I mean, look at that water.

Gross... lol!

Apparently, the Romans built a covering over the baths (there are several)

because the natural springs combined with direct sunlight result in a lot of algae.

 Plus there were a lot of signs telling you NOT to touch the water.

However, I still saw people putting their hands in it...

 After the baths, we had a little time to roam around the town before our bus headed back to London.

We saw this beautiful park and decided to go relax in it.

 On our way to the entrance we passed these ladies.. lol!

 When we got to the entrance, we noticed you had to pay to go to the park.

So we decided to go find an ice cream parlor and get ice cream and look at the park from above instead.

 We got back to London with plenty of time still left in the day.

So we got off the bus by Hyde Park and wandered around the park.

I'm SO glad we did.

It was probably one of my favorite things.

It was SO beautiful! Especially since it was right at sunset.

 I took a lot of pictures and had a hard time cutting some out, so there are a lot!

 The next day was Sunday,

we decided to go visit some friends in Cambridge.

One of my sweet husband's old coworkers moved his family to Cambridge so he could go back to school.

My sweet husband was so tired and fell asleep on the train, and I, of course, had to document it!

 In Cambridge we were able to cross off a England must do, ride a double decker bus,

as I was going through our pictures I was a little sad that I didn't take one that really showed we were on one. Oh well, I guess.

 Our friends have two children, while the kiddos were taking naps, 

our friend took us on a tour of their little town (don't worry their mom stayed with them).

 After the kiddos were rested up,

we headed to Cambridge and they gave us a tour.

This is called the Mathematical Bridge.

 This was Stephen Hawking's house.

 Like most places in England, it was beautiful!

 This is the Isaac Newton tree.

 Our group (except for the man walking by, he wasn't with us)

 They had an awesome little bazaar going on, 

but we didn't look too closely since it was Sunday.

 This store made me laugh

and think of my baby sister.

This was her nickname when she was little, given to her by one of our uncles.

It was her name because she was (is) skinny as a rail.

 Our friend is going to school to get his MBA.

On our tour, we went to his building.

This is the business school.

I think it should be the pediatric ward or something.

It looks like it is straight out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory...

 That night when we got back to London, we finally set out to find Platform 9 3/4.

I mean, we'd stayed right by Kings Cross all this time, we had to at least see it once!

We were going to take a picture with it, but apparently you have to be on the Harry Potter Tour,

which we didn't do because it's super expensive.

So this picture was enough for us.

But if you were on the tour they dressed you up in a Gryffindor Scarf and had you jump and everything.

It was pretty rad. 

 Our final day in England we went to Windsor Castle.

We got there before it opened.

So to pass some time in line we read,

apparently Popular Mechanics has a contest you can submit pictures to of someone reading Popular Mechanics in cool places. We're hoping to win big.. lol!

 Somehow, we were the first ones through the gates and had Windsor Castle ALL to ourselves for a while!

 So we took great pictures since we didn't have to worry about people getting in our way!

 Our tour guide said that the doll houses were a pretty cool thing to see if the line wasn't too long.

As you can see, it wasn't long at all, so we went and looked.

They were pretty amazing.

Queen Mary apparently loved Doll Houses, so her granddaughter (I believe) had a great idea

of having someone make a replica of an aristocratic home as a doll's house. Complete with gold plates.

 We never got a picture with a guard somehow, 

but we found this awesome one at one of the stores at Windsor.

 After we got back to London and before we left to go to Belgium,

my sweet husband sampled Fish and Chips, a English must have, since I'd already tried it before,

I declined.. lol.

 We thought it was funny that even the sauce was brought to us by Her Majesty the Queen...

 Our last lunch was right by the awesome ticket booth that got us great tickets to the plays we saw!