LeeDylanLinda: July 2nd - 6th, 2016 London

We arrived in London in the morning after yet another overnight flight, so far all our long flights have been overnight in which case Dylan is the only one who gets any real sleep. I’ve got to say I’m jealous of people that have the ability to crash out anywhere in any position. Needless to say, arriving in the morning means needing to stay awake for the majority of the day to keep on schedule. Once we made it to our flat across the street form Kensington Garden (part of Hyde Park), we headed back out to the London Science Museum. Before we got there Dylan was already intrigued by things he had never seen before .....

We eventually managed to stay awake through the day and bought groceries at the largest Whole Foods I’ve ever seen.

The next day Linda had signed us up for a free (except for tip to guide who actually pays Sandemans to be able to lead the tours) Sandemans walking tour of Westminster. Before the tour we had breakfast with one of Linda’s college friends, Dawn and her family, who has lived all over Europe and has been in London for the last 8 years. Among the many things we saw were Westminster Abbey, the changing of the guard .....

St. James Park, Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster with Big Ben .....

Dylan really enjoyed our guide, Lars, who told stories of the London/British history in a pretty engaging manner .....

, he earned a nice tip. It was a pretty long day. It is also worth noting that we had just traveled from the Southern Hemisphere where we were for the winter solstice and day light lasted from 8am to 6pm, to the Northern Hemisphere one week after the summer solstice and day light lasts from 4am to 10pm which is wreaking havoc on our internal clocks. The below shot is sitting on out porch looking out at Kensington Garden at 9:30pm .....

On the 4th of July, ironically, we visited the Tower of London, being where the royalty resided up to about the time the British were planting a flag in the US. It was pretty cool to see the whole castle and all the different items housed there, including the Crown Jewels (holy 530.2 karat diamond). Then there were the Beefeaters (guards of the Tower), after doing the audio tour we lined up for the free Beefeater tour. Yet again, Dylan loves listening to the tales that are told by these guides and they are quite interesting .....

After the Tower we headed to a climbing gym to pick up the bouldering guide book. After a little searching we decided to go to The Castle Climbing Center, because how can you say no to a climbing gym in a castle.

On the 5th we headed to The British Museum. The museum houses an amazing collection of art and artifacts from around the world and is just enormous. We focused on the highlights like The Rosetta Stone, sculptures from The Parthenon (though we still need to go to Athens at some point), other Greek works, the Easter Island figure and Egyptian artifacts. For many of the items though I’m left feeling that maybe they really belong in a museum in the country of origin while in others if they had remained there they would have likely ended up in someones private collection. To finish off the day, we headed to Kings Cross Station because of its association with Harry Potter and to see the Platform 9 3/4 shop and tourist trap, we did not partake in anything because of tomorrows planned activity.

Our next day, after struggling through the Underground with our luggage to the airport and picking up our rental car (yes, no car while in London) we drove out to the Warner Bros. Studio for The Making of Harry Potter tour. This was a really cool experience and highly recommended for any fans of HP. They give a lot of background for the making of the movies and talk about how certain scenes were made. All the props and sets were the ones used in the movies themselves (though at times there were multiple versions). Here, Dylan and Linda wand shopping .....