Monday September 16

Photos finally added to this post.

Monday, September 9

Having gotten a good sense of where everything was and what we wanted a closer look at yesterday during the double-decker bus tour, today we planned our day pretty well.

After breakfast at our hotel, we joined rush-hour traffic on the Tube at Colliers Wood, arriving in London in time to walk in the direction of Buckingham Palace. We had decided not to watch the changing of the guard here, but to walk to St. James's for the guard change there in order to be able to see.

The weather began to change from cloudy and overcast to raining lightly to raining not so lightly, but we got good photos of the Palace. We had time to detour for closer looks at Westminster Cathedral and Big Ben (which Steve calls Benjy), and then in heavier rain to walk back to St. James's Palace.

If the guards ever changed, we missed it. But they sat astride their horses in miserable weather for 30 minutes or so, and we stood across the street in the same miserable weather (but neither upon horses nor unprotected from the rain, since we found several trees to hover under).

Next we hoofed it over to the Thames to catch a boat tour from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge and back, cleverly and luckily avoiding the worst of the rain under cover. Terry got some great photos with her iPad through the rain-streaked window of the boat, including the Eye; the WWII and Korean War ship, The Belfast; the Tower of London (which we plan to tour tomorrow); and Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

Tower Bridge through Rain-Streaked Tour Boat Window

Once off the boat, we headed directly to the Tube for a quick trip to Knightsbridge where we found Harrod's easily. Sue was interested in shopping there, and so we did for an hour or so.

Next we found Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub touted in Rick Steves's guide to Great Britain. We were pretty unimpressed with the food, but I had another British lager that was satisfactory; the carrot and cardamom soup was not very good but the sticky toffee pudding passed muster. The pub was dark and partially underground, and it was easy to imagine Samuel Johnson spending some time there.

We then walked toward the Thames to find the Tube, and we caught a beautiful image of the sun finally showing itself over the Thames and the London Eye (the Ferris wheel at the left edge of the photo below) as the day waned.

We had to backtrack a bit on the Tube (Wimbledon is not the same as South Wimbledon and they do not share the same Tube line), but we managed to get back where we belonged.

We arrived at our hotel to find that it had introduced free Wifi today (hello 21st century), so we did a bit of catching up with email and this blog. No luck with my phone yet, though, so all those recent photos won't transfer to the Cloud. Sorry about that.

Walked 16,477 steps, 8 miles.