London – busy blur …

Saturday 7/3/2010 - Tuesday, 7/6/2010.

On Saturday, 7/3, we saw the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, had lunch at the Hard Rock Café & saw The Vault (rock & roll museum next door for the Hard Rock Cafe), walked through Green Park & St. James Park, visited the Churchill Museum & War Room, rode on the London Eye (a giant ferris wheel built for the Millennium on the Thames river), and had dinner at the Shakespeare Pub.

On Sunday, 7/4, we went to the Tower of London, and visited the British Museum.

On Monday, 7/5, we went to Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, had dinner at Garfunkel’s (I had a traditional British Breakfast for dinner, otherwise known as “heart attack on a plate” – it wasn’t very good). This was an ambitious day, as we ended the day with a live musical play @ Dominion Theatre called “We Will Rock You” with the music of Queen with a great, live rock band.

A little more on the Westminster Abbey, which was right next to Big Ben and the British Parliament on the River Thames. There is a lot of history in the Westminster Abbey, as Kings and Queens have been coronated and buried there, and there are many other famous people buried there, inside, or there are memorials are there for them. Famous people buried there are Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Keats, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Laurence Olivier, and George Fredrick Handel, among many others. (My mom sang Handel's Messiah with the Pensacola (Florida) Choir and we have a LP record of this). After the Westminster Abbey, we went to St. Paul's Cathedral that survived the aerial bombings of Britain by Germany during World War II.

We leave London by train on Tuesday, 7/6 for Edinburgh, Scotland, so we should be able to see the countryside during the 4 ½ hour train ride. We will have 4 days there in Scotland (4 nights, 3 full days for being tourists), which I'm really looking forward to. There's a lot of history there.

During the train ride from London to Edinburgh, we passed countryside that looks like the mid-west U.S., around Missouri that we are familiar with, with rolling hills, agricultural land, and older farm houses and villages. We also passed clusters of modern wind turbines and also what looked like many nuclear power plants (about a half-dozen sites with clusters of 4 to 7 cooling towers, the shapes of what look like our nuclear plants).

Todd