The grass part around this first picture and in the next one was where the moat used to be. We know my brother-in-law likes trebuchets, so we had to take a picture of this one for him.
There were lots of areas to go into and walk around inside the Tower of London. Each focused on a different area of life in the Tower. There were a lot of people so we didn't get to see everything as much as we would have liked to, but we still got to see it. There were some neat architectural parts to some of the buildings.
There are ravens that live inside the Tower of London (even though they could easily fly away). It is said that England will stay in power as long as there are always ravens living in the Tower of London. They now have cages and someone who takes care of the ravens to make sure they stay.
These men in the red and black suits were all over. I'm not really sure who they are or what they are doing, but they looked pretty neat.
There were lots of beheadings that took place in the Tower of London. This monument was erected to remember those people. Henry the Eighth ordered a lot of these beheadings.
One room had all different torture devices that were used in the Tower of London. This one is a stretcher. I think I might need this one to make me a bit taller! :)
There was also a building dedicated to the armor that the kings wore. Here's one of Henry VIII's suits of armor.
There was also one room about the money of England from its beginnings. The Tower of London used to be where they made the money for the country. This display showed how they want to change the coinage of England to be different parts of a shield.
After seeing all of the Tower of London, including the Crown Jewels (which we couldn't take pictures of), we headed out for some lunch. We hadn't had fish and chips yet, so that is what we had.
We then walked toward the Tower Bridge to take the tour of it, but had to take some pictures on the way.
The tour took us up the first tower and then we could walk along both sides of the top and then down the second tower. On our way up, the girl running the elevator told us that the bridge was going to life in about 20 minutes. We wanted to see this, so we went quite quickly through the top section of the bridge (which wasn't very interesting anyway) so that we could get to the other side and take some pictures of the bridge lifting for a boat to go through. Brian took a lot of pictures of this (enough that I could probably make a flip book out of it!).
We then finished our tour by going into the Engine Room where they have the old steam engines that used to raise and lower the bridge. Brian really liked this part because he got to show me how it all works and got to see some machines.
When we left the Engine Room, we had to walk back over the bridge to get to the bus station we needed. We got to the bridge just as they were closing the gates to pedestrians in order to raise the bridge for another boat. This time we got to see it from on the bridge!
We then headed back to our hotel to pack up our stuff and get a good night's rest. On Monday morning we took a bus back to the airport, flew back to Memmingen, and then took the train back to Friedrichshafen. We took advantage of a book store in the London airport to get some books and a game in English. We ran into one of Brian's coworkers in the train station in Friedrichshafen, so we ended up talking to him for a while before we walked back home.
Overall it was a great trip! We're hoping to go back there in the early summer for another LSO concert that I would really like to see and perhaps we'll see some of the things that we missed on this trip.
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