London - Day 2

Friday was the day of the bike tour for our trip to London.  My sister and her husband introduced us to Fat Tire Bike Tours which gives 4 hour-ish bike tours in Barcelona, London, Berlin, and Paris.  Katie and Kyle did the tours in Paris and London and we had done the tour in Barcelona.  Once you get stamps from all four tours, you get a free t-shirt!  The tours are a great way to see a lot of the highlights of a big city.  Since Katie and Kyle hadn't gotten their sheets stamped in London, we had to make sure we did the tour, so that was the plan for our first full day in London.

The guy at the left of this picture was our tour guide.  He was excellent!!  The big building in the background was someone's castle that Brian gave a score of a -2 when our tour guide asked what we thought about it.  :)

This sign was one that our tour guide ignored with us.  :)  We thought it was pretty funny!

We stopped at one point on our tour in Hyde Park Corner and the Horse Guards came walking by.  These guards change every day and walk to Buckingham Palace.  It was cool to see them in all their garb and riding on the horses.

Brian thought the taxis were pretty cool in London, so he had to get a picture of one of them.  I'm not sure what the building in the back is, but the car in the center is a London taxi.

We then stopped in Trafalgar Square and had time to take pictures and have lunch.  We had to get some pictures of Big Ben and actually got a picture of the two of us!

Brian had a pretty sweet bike on our tour - it was Blue and had a Bee on it - the B bike!

We rode through St. James Park and this dog thought the fountain looked like a good place for a drink.

There were some pretty neat things and views in this park.  One thing that we saw that we didn't get a picture of was the pelicans.  There are a few pelicans in the park and they like to terrorize people and other birds.  There's a YouTube video of the pelicans in this park eating a pigeon whole!  It's pretty crazy!  Unfortunately, the pelican came upon us pretty quickly and there was a park worker chasing it away from the people, so we weren't fast enough to get a picture of it, but here's some of the views in St. James Park.

After the bike tour, we made our way to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but had to take a quick stop by a London telephone booth for a picture.

We also had to get a picture of one of the light posts with Coco Chanel's initials on it that one of the kings had put there when he was in love with her.

We got to the Victoria and Albert Museum and were surprised by one wall on the outside.  They had left some of the damage made by bombs in WWII on one of the walls as a memorial to what happened then.  It was amazing all the different war monuments that were all over the city.

We finally made it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in which I only wanted to see one thing.  There was a Dale Chihuly glass sculpture in the entrance of the museum.  Chihuly had a bunch of pieces at the Fredrik Meijer Gardens in GR this summer and I went to see them with my mom, Oma, and my mom's friend.  I loved what he did with glass and wanted to make sure that I saw this one while we were in London.

We then headed to My Old Dutch Pancake restaurant for dinner.  My sister had told us about this and said it was a pretty good place to eat.  We loved it!  Brian got a pancake with pepperoni, chorizo, tomato sauce, cheese, and peppers on it.  I got a pancake with apples and cinnamon baked into it with whipped cream on top.  They were delicious!  Brian also had to try some English tea and he finally had a chance here.

We then booked it back to our hotel to change so that we could get to the Lion King musical that we were going to that night.  We were almost late since our tube rides were rather slow, but we made it before the show started.  The show was excellent!  I think this was Brian's favorite part of the whole trip!  The different costumes that they had for the different animals were very cool.  I think my favorite was the giraffes because it was people with stilts for the hands and feet and they were walking on all fours high in the air.  It don't think I could do that!  Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures while we were there, so we don't have any pictures of the show.