London Day 1

As I mentioned some time ago, we decided to make a quick trip to England this summer because two of our close friends we made in Kazakhstan were renewing their vows.  We enjoyed spending time with them, as well as other friends we made over there who also came for the occasion.  The renewal of vows was in Ipswich, but we flew into London and decided to spend our first two nights there since I had never been.

When choosing flights, we had two options that would allow us to use our frequent flyer miles:  leave DC early in the morning and arrive in London in the evening, or leave DC in the evening and arrive in London midmorning.  We decided the first option was the lesser of the evils, since it would allow us to go straight to the hotel and go to sleep, rather than having to stagger around the city bleary eyed and jet lagged.  This worked reasonably well, although getting up at 4 AM to go to Dulles and standing in line for 2 hours to go through passport control at Heathrow before being able to get to our hotel were perhaps the most challenging portions of the trip.

Since we had limited time, we decided to spend the first day (and our only full day) walking around the city, seeing the outside of a lot of the tourists sites, but not mostly not going inside.  We were lucky that the weather was very cooperative!

We headed to Buckingham Palace first.  We were there for the changing of the guards.  I don't think I've ever seen such large crowds of people at a site before.  Needless to say, I wasn't able to get too close to any of the action.

After that, we headed in the direction of some of the other sites we wanted to see, and on a whim, went inside Fortnum and Mason to see about having tea.  This was a splurge, but one that turned out well, both because it was something fun that we wouldn't ordinarily do and because the caffeine from the tea enabled us to stay up for the rest of the day.  Pro tip:  If you're going to be like me and drink a whole pot of tea at once since it is both the most delicious and the most expensive tea you have ever had, be sure you have 20 and 50 pence coins because those seem to be the usual denominations needed to use public bathrooms.  Or you could do what I actually did and just stroll into the lobby of a hotel as if you're staying there...

We saw a number of sites after that, including the parliament and Big Ben...

The London Eye...

Bridges, including London Bridge and Tower Bridge (I thought about that song London Bridge is Falling Down for the first time in perhaps 30 years)...

The Tower of London...

And some miscellaneous fun things...

We tried to walk back to our hotel after seeing the Tower of London, but only got part of the way before we decided we were way too tired and flagged down a cab.  We ended the day with dinner at an Indian restaurant near the hotel, and then with slices of cake left over from our Fortnum and Mason tea.  We would need to catch a train to Ipswich the next day, but not until the afternoon.