London
In an effort to beat the crowds, and see everything we wanted to see, we got up at the crack of dawn and headed out to take in all the sites on our list.
We went southwest from Trafalgar Square past Admiralty Arch, down The Mall, along the edge of St James Park toward Buckingham Palace. It was a beautiful, sunny, Sunday morning, so there were even less people on the streets than normal.
"Cool" and a big old smile was Sean's reaction.
I seriously had never seen the Palace grounds so empty. It was almost eerie.
But it gave us a chance to take all kinds of great pictures.
Admittedly, we still aren't very good at taking selfies
After Buckingham Palace, we headed down Birdcage Walk to Parliament Road, where very suddenly, it seemed, Big Ben loomed in front of us.
They'd done quite a lot of cleanup work on the old clock. It gleamed in the morning sun.
We walked around the Parliament building (Westminster Palace for you history buffs),
and my hero, Queen Boudica.
We passed the Prime Ministers residence, 10 Downing Street, which was under heavy guard, and stopped by New Scotland Yard for a quick picture.
We then headed across the river for our first official sightseeing tour at The Imperial War Museum.
After a couple hours of the history of the United Kingdom's role in a lot of wars (though mostly WWII, Sean's main area of interest) we walked back over the river to the London Eye.
I still think it's an eye-sore, a great big Ferris Wheel dominating the landscape around the greatest part of London,
but as we got into our car and started up, I started to understand the appeal.
The views were incredible.
Being up really, really high was not incredible (for me. Anyone who knows me knows heights are not my thing).
It had been a very, very long day of sightseeing, and we made it back to the hotel in time to go back out for some dinner and more pub crawling.
We were starting to find places where we were most comfortable, like The Cambridge (one of our favorites) and the Salisbury, where poet Dylan Thomas used to hang out.
We managed to squeeze (literally in some cases) into a few new establishments.
We ended our night, as we did almost every night in London, at the Princess of Wales near Embankment. A pub I used to frequent back in the day, the Princess was about half a block from the hotel.
The next day was more walking around London and we couldn't wait to see what new adventures we could find.
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