Day 2 - London

Well, after sleeping almost half a day - we crashed at 9:00 the previous night and woke up around 8:00 - we got up and got going for our 2nd day in London. We started by walking towards Parliament, Big Ben and Westminster. Cheri is actually related to King Richard on her dad's side so she took a few pictures of his statue which is just outside of Parliament.

While planning for this trip we ran across a few pictures of a classic old building in the middle of the new city. It really captured our attention and we wanted to take the same picture. So, after leaving Westminster and taking a bunch of pictures there we headed down the street towards the building. Drew found his first London Geocache (of course). And then we stopped to take some pictures of the Alfred!

As we walked around town we kept noticing the papers advertising a jibe the Queen made at the G20 conference. Curiosity got the better of us and we found the link here. Apparently it had been a slow news day in England.

After walking past the Albert we found out way over to Buchingham Palace. The changing of the guard had been cancelled for this day so we missed that....but we wandered around for a while and took lots of pictures. We also decided to recreate a picture of Drew. When he was about 11 his parents took him to London. While going through some family pictures the other day we found a picture of Drew in front of the gate. So - we took the same picture...we'll have to post the original one later.

From there we tried to have Afternoon Tea the Ritz - but had forgotten to make reservatoins. So, we headed over to Harrod's for some browsing and Lunch. We had Fish and Chips at Harrod's and then kept shopping. We found something for our two youngest daughters..They'll have to be surprised.

The food court of Harrod's in simply incredible. We found this collection of Turkish Delight - an instant reminder of Narnia and took a picture for the kids.

And yet another picture for Jessica - our lover of cheesecake!

Dinner was at the Blue Door Bistro - this resturant had great reviews - yet we weren't as impressed as the reviews made it out to be. Still, it was a nice quiet evening meal. And heck - we are in London - how can you complain?

For appetizers we split the French Onion soup and the Wild Mushroom and Artichoke Soup.

We were both somewhat unoriginal and went with the beef dish for dinner.....served on spinach with onions. It was very good.

You can see Cheri's teapot in the background with some very intresting Strawberry and Mango herbal tea.

Our waitress also brought out a plate of 3 different kinds of salts and butter when she brought out our bread. We were slightly confused and decided to ask. As it turned out our waitress wasn't much help, she had never used them as well, but at least knew what they were. The brownish salt was a smoked salt, the white, simply regular sea salt and the dark salt a vanilla salt. Very interesting. She suggested that we try them on the bread.

Desert was one of Cheri's favorites and served perfectly. Cheri loves Creme Brulee - yet she likes it so the cream is warm. It's actually one of the reasons we own our own torch now, so we can properly make Creme Brulee the way she prefers it, and as a result, the rest of us, like it now.

Dinner took so long our plans were actually had to change at this point. We had hoped to spend some time in the British Museum. They are open late on the weekend but even with a 6:30 dinner sitting we didn't get out of the resturant till almost 9:00.

One of the things we have found very nice in England is the architecture. For example, these carved rosettes that cross the brick and the mortor. You have to respect that type of work.

Now - Pictures. You should be able to click on any of these an go to our Flickr site where you will see the rest of the pictures we have posted. You can also click on the links at the top of this page. We have even geotagged some of the images so you can see exactly where (or close) to where they were taken!