Big City Lights

Wow, back from the big city of LONDON!!! What a fast, hectic, awesome, whirlwind couple of days. We have navigated the underground, fought through other tourists, sat in the top of a double decked bus and fed a squirrel in Hyde Park. :-)

We arrived in London on Wednesday (11th Sept) after a 5 hour train and tube trip. We had a quick walk around wimbledon, no wombles unfortunately!
12th Sept: into London Town we go! We headed straight to the Natural History Museum. It is absolutely mind-blowing, wow!!! There are more spectacular rocks and minerals than a geologist can look at! 'The Vault' was a collection of interesting and precious stones, including a PRIVATE (!!!) collection of 296 coloured diamonds. Unfortunately the dinosaurs were on holiday, but that didn't mean we didn't have enough to keep us busy. We saluted Darwin's statue and enjoyed some very cool fossils! We spent about 3 hours there and only did half of the museum. Definitely somewhere to go and see again next time! After that we had a quick (2hours) look around the Science museum - history of computing, maths and flying. Exhausted after all this excitement, we dragged ourselves up to Hyde Park for our picnic lunch. The rain stayed away :-) and we got to see part of the World  Championship Triathlon as they swam around the Serpentine Lake. And of course I found my squirrels who shared my lunch with me. Once recovered and revived we walked to Harrods. WOW!!! Scary and waaaay too many people, but very interesting to see. Loads of money being spent and incredible to see all the different nationalities in one place.

13th Sept: Happy Birthday Miss Bray! Kirst met us in the morning and we made our way into London to find a hop-on-hop-off red bus tour. Apart from being veeery wet, it was a great interesting way to see all the sights for the first time and to get some of the history behind this amazing city. Unfortunately, due to the rain, my camera didn't click nearly as much as I wanted it to, but got a couple of good shops. We ended the tour with a cruise along the Thames River. After being nicely drenched we headed to a yummy Thai Restaurant for supper to meet some of Kirst's friends and to warm up!

14th Sept: early morning rugby with a room full of South Africans who quickly became very unhappy South Africans! After the disappointing game, we headed back to the city towards the Tower of London. We went the traditional route and had fish and chips for lunch, in front of the Tower, overlooking the Thames and fighting off pigeons! Once inside, we explored the White Tower and saw the very sparkly and impressive Crown Jewels. We also had a look at the torture chambers and saw the spot where numerous people, including Anne Boleyn was beheaded! A very grim part of London's history and scary to think how much absolute power some of the Kings had. Tim loved the exhibitions in the White Tower, with all the armour and weapons. There was also very cool dragon made out of guns, maps and armour. The history in this one small(ish) part of London is incredible.
After Tower of London we made our way back to Putney to celebrate Kirst getting old at the boathouse on the Thames River. It was a great night with lots of South Africans to chat to. A fantastic way to toast London, :-)

15th Sept: time to head back to Scotland, with a long list of things to do on our next trip to the big city!

Lots of love to everyone!xxx H♥