EIS – London (Day 3)

EIS – London (Day 3)

(8/20/2010) Today was busy. We had breakfast around 9:00am and then left the hotel and went walking again. The weather is in the low 60’s and should reach about 70 today. That said Carmen did pack appropriately. She has a jacket and jeans on this morning.

This time our walk is in the opposite direction from yesterday, having only 3 hours until we head out to the Tower of London, we only walked for an hour before returning. After we returned to the hotel, we took a nap for an hour, but were up in time to meet our bus ride to the Tower of London.

We traveled through London on a different route than we had been on before so most of the scenery was new to us. (We were here four years ago so we did not take the city tour.) We arrived at the Tower of London and walked around for about three hours, but made sure we saw the crown jewels. Wow – magnificent!

I don’t know about Carmen, but I was in medieval heaven. The old drawbridge section of the castle was destroyed years ago, but the ground works was uncovered so you could see where they held the lions if the floor was pulled out from under an intruders. Nice.

We entered the Castle grounds by the group entrance and then on from there. To get to the internals grounds, we entered through the “Bloody Tower”, the literal name for the gate and tower we used, which was built in 1225. There were a number of different buildings in the place including the White Castle which housed the crown jewels. Again, wow.

We were able to see the guard inspection begin, but unable to see the ending or the marching around the square. Since many people in the line before us going in to see the crown jewels stood around to watch the show, we jumped the line and went in. No pictures from inside the vault (there were 2 2-ton vault doors to seal off the vault) so we do not have any of the jewels, but let just say that one of the jewels on one of the crowns is a tad over 617 carrots. That’s big.

Got some pictures though from out in the courtyard and castle though. I also got a picture of Carmen with one of the Beefeaters.

We returned to the hotel around 5:30pm and unloaded some of the stuff we carried and then headed for Piccadilly Circle. We got to the Underground (subway) and got round trip tickets for the trains. We hopped on the first train, oh wait, I got on the train and the doors closed leaving Carmen stranded on the platform. Oh no. I got off the next station (we were doing this anyway) and waited for Carmen. She showed up about 5 minutes later. There was someone working where we got on and helped her choose the right train, having here skip the first train arriving where she was since it does not always stop at the station I was on. Whew, anyway, she caught up to me and we proceeded to the next train without incident.

We get back above ground and believe me when I say that at 6:00pm Piccadilly Circle was very busy. People all over the place. We started walking and decided to eat at a restaurant a block down the street.

After eating, we walked to Leicester Square, over to China Town then headed to Trafalgar Square. At this time of night, there are a lot of people out and about. We took pictures of the square with its fountains and also of Big Ben which you can see from the square. After seeing the square and taking, the pictures we wanted we then headed back to Piccadilly Square to take the subway back to our hotel location.

Of course, yours truly chose the wrong Kensington terminal and we ended up in the wrong place. So back down to the underground again for the trip back to Earl’s Court (the underground hub where you make several train connections) to get on the correct train for the correct Kensington station. It all worked out, including the pastry shop still being open. Man would I have heard about that if it had closed. In any case, the shop was open and the strawberry tarts fantastic.

Bob did not mention we saw many bakeries and coffee shops that had great pastries. Last time we were here, we could not find any in the area we stayed.

Untile tomorrow, Bob and Carmen – EIS.