London

Last weekend we took a train over to ye olde Londontown. Of course we got stuck on the train for an extra two hours because there was a problem in the Chunnel. We finally made it to our hotel in the late afternoon and went to a nearby pub to get some food. The food wasn't great, but I finally got some fish and chips with mushy peas.

Then it was off to go sightseeing! From our previous experiences, I already knew that many things in Europe look much cooler at night, so we weren't deterred from going to see some of the things on our list. We started at Big Ben and Westminster, and made our way over to the London Eye. We were walking on the bridge across the Thames when it started raining. It wasn't too bad at first, but by the time we got to the pedestrian bridge to get back across it was raining sideways really hard and we got soaked. The kind of freezing rain that hurts when it hits your face. But we didn't want to just sit in the hotel all night, so we pushed on along a path that followed the Thames, and saw many of the bridges and buildings we wanted to see. The rain stopped after a while and it turned into a nice night. But the sights were farther apart than we originally thought, so after a while we called it a night and went back to the hotel.

Sunday we finally saw the sun! We started off at Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately they weren't doing a changing of the guard that day, so there wasn't a whole lot to see.

We headed through the Horse Parade to Trafalgar Square, with it's impressive obelisk, lion statues, fountains, and giant blue rooster.

 We saw London Tower, which has some great history to it, then spent a bit of time on Tower Bridge with its wonderful view of the area around it. There's such a contrast between the older stone castles and bridges and the new huge glass buildings like the Gherkin and the Shard and City Hall. It's an interesting combination of very different architectures but really shows the history of the city and how it's changed over a long period of time.

Then we headed over to St. Paul's Cathedral, which was beautiful. I've been in more churches and cathedrals on this trip than I've ever seen before in my life and they continue to impress me with their amazing architecture and construction and history.

We had a late train, so we killed some more time near Big Ben and Westminster Abbey and enjoyed a nice little break by the Thames before heading to the train station to catch our ride back to Paris. Next time we'll have to spend more time doing things. We were a little rushed and there's so much to see!

Many more pictures in the gallery!