We’ve been home for 1 week, and I finally made it through the London pictures.
Day 1: Central London. We did it all with the The Original Tour–double decker buses, a ride on the Thames, the Tube, and our own Chevrolegs. Don’t ask me what all of these things are, it was a beautiful urban historic contemporary blur! What a vibrant city!
Many photo credits to Anders. We are going to present this in reverse chronological order, because that’s the way the pictures loaded into the blog. Enjoy!
We used AirBnB to find this flat on the southern side of London, about a 30 minute ride on the Tube to Central London.
The Sphinx and obelisk were taken from Egypt, and their twins are located in New York. These were lost in a storm at sea, but later recovered and installed here in London. It’s amazing to see something so old, by human hands. The Sphinx has damage from bombs in WWII as well.
This funny guy was on the street near a food stand. Ha!
Gardens outside…maybe the Parliament building, I think. People were playing table tennis!
The Tower Bridge, as seen from our boat tour on the Thames. Stunning! And the drawbridge opened while we were watching, and a pirate ship sailed through! 
More of the bridges that we passed on the boat trip. 
This was a fortress used for centuries, torture and death. When you went in those gates, you didn’t come out. 
The Eye of London as seen from the boat tour.
Outside some government buildings they were showing some air force planes–Ted knows all about some of them, like the Spitfire.
We were in time to see the changing of the Horse Guard. They looked like kids (probably were), and were guarded by heavily armed policy. Guards for the guards. 
Outside Buckingham Palace, a horse-drawn carriage came out as we were walking up, and later a marching band started playing somewhere nearby. We didn’t follow the festivities, but enjoyed the glimpse of the carriage.
It was a beautiful day, and Anders enjoyed taking pictures of Winged Victory atop the Victoria Memorial, for Queen Victoria, right outside of the palace.
The hop-on-hop-off tour was a great way to see the city, on top of the open-air double decker buses. 
The buses had an audio tour with interesting tidbits. This statue was huge, and was hollow at one time, so when it rained it would fill up and it would look like huge horse mucous coming out of it! It’s been modified to avoid that look.
Trafalgar square was hopping with all kinds of people and performers, including 2 floating yodas! 
The Tube was easy enough to navigate, but a hot tight squeeze at rush hour. We couldn’t get on 2 full trains that came in and left, so we finally stood right around the “Mind the Gap” sign so that we would be right in front of the doors, and pushed our way on to the 3rd train on the way home. We made it!
