London In One Day - Part 1

After a good nights sleep, we were ready to head out to explore London on our one free day before our tour officially started.  Before leaving home, we had made reservations for a Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour that takes you around to all the major sights in London with narration that describes what you are looking at, and you can get on and off the bus anywhere along the route.  Sounded like a wonderful idea . . . except we had no idea where to pick up the bus.  We asked at the hotel and they sent us off in one direction . . . we weren't sure and asked people on the street, and each person had a different answer and sent us in different directions.  Everyone is really friendly and helpful, but we were walking and walking and getting nowhere.  And our guys, neither of whom are good walkers, were getting very frustrated to put it mildly.  Finally, we stumbled upon the right place and we were off on our adventure.

The bus driver suggested we stay on the bus all the way to the London Tower, get off there, explore the Tower, then take the included cruise on the River Thames back to the main part of London.  So that sounded like a great plan, and we enjoyed the tour.  I tried to take photos from the bus, without much success, but here are a few to give you some idea of what we saw . . .We hope to get back to some of these places later, so if we do, I'll post better pictures . . . Click on the pictures to see them bigger.

The Hop-On Hop-Off Open Top Bus

Ruth and Me on the Upper Deck of the bus - The Guys Chose to Stay Below (they finally did come up top later)

The British Museum - This is where the bus tour started

A hotel near the British Museum - I was fascinated by the architecture

A random building - what caught my eye was the flower baskets - we saw beautiful baskets like these all over London



One of the many theatres in London

Trafalgar Square

Closer look at Trafalgar Square

Typical London Street

Hard Rock Cafe - The very first Hard Rock opened in London - The restaurant was started because the owner couldn't find a decent American style hamburger in London.

Queen Victoria's entrance to Buckingham Palace

Visitors Entrance to Buckingham Palace

Big Ben with London Eye in background

Westminster Abbey

Parliament Building, Big Ben and River Thames

Lion Statue - Lion's were popular here and there are statues everywhere.  When I asked about it, I was told it represented the power of the Kings.

London Eye

The damage on this building is from World War II

This tiny little tea shop is the longest single owned shop in the Guinness Book of World Records

Westminster Abbey

The Tower Bridge

Another view of Tower Bridge

And another as the bus was driving across it

The Olympic Rings under the Tower Bridge - they were raised so that the bridge could open to allow big ships to go through.  Sadly, we never actually saw the bridge open.

The London Dungeon - Where all the scary things are.  We didn't go inside . . .

It was great to see all these famous places, and I really hope we'll have a chance to get up close and personal to them when we are back in London at the end of our trip.  I want more!!!!!

Next stop was the Tower of London, and we got off the bus so we could explore it.  More about that in the next entry.