Hi folks,
Having a great time. Mom, yes I’m eating, yes I’m sleeping, yes I’m having fun and no, there’s nothing to worry about.
Woke up today to the news that Wings won in triple-overtime. Yay!
Today, we took in a few last but important sights. We started out a little later than anticipated at St. Paul’s Cathedral as our first stop. Later in the tour, it’ll probably be “seen one church, seen ’em all”, but today was the first one so it was really quite beautiful. Stunning architecture. From there, we headed over to Buckingham Palace on the top deck of a double-decker bus. That was cool, because you look up front and there’s no driver, because he’s down below. Buckingham Palace itself wasn’t really all that special. We’d missed the changing of the guards earlier in the day, so we just watched the two guards march back and forth. The most interesting thing that they did was to go stand inside a box briefly, presumably to get out of the rain – it was pouring pretty good.
From there, we went to Leicester Square to the Haagen Dazs restaurant for ice cream… mmmm. It wasn’t as appreciated, though, because it was cold and wet outside. But despite that, we actually had to wait a good fifteen minutes for a table. Then, a quick photo op at Piccadilly Circus, and we had a bit of time to kill so Jon took us to see the Marble Arch, which he didn’t introduce all that enthusiastically. Honestly, he’s been an amazing host, but as a tour guide, he’s getting lost and confused a lot! We make fun of him a lot cause his dad is a black cab driver, so we figure he should know where everything is.
After that, we headed over to the Hard Rock Café for dinner. Katy, another of Elie’s and Jon’s friends from camp, met up with us there. With an hour to kill before the table was ready, we used our free tickets for a tour of the “vault” underneath the Hard Rock Shop. In there are guitars and memorabilia belonging to all the legends of rock n’ roll – Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Bo Diddly’s original string guitar, Buddy Holly, etc. etc. I was in music heaven. Got a photo sitting on a couch that used to belong to Jimi Hendrix, holding Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar. Our “tour guide” was a security guard named Frankie, who was Portuguese and super-nice. He claimed he didn’t usually conduct the tours, so he let us hold the guitars and take pictures and we spent a good twenty minutes chatting with him. We also met a Canadian couple from London, Ontario, who we thought were going to be on our tour, but it turns out the guy’s doing a Contiki Camping tour instead.
After dinner, we headed back to Jon’s and took a bunch of photos and said a few goodbyes and thank-yous to his family. London’s starting to feel a bit more like home. We’ve seen tons of tourist attractions, but we’ve also done lots of local stuff too – staying in the suburbs and going to local pubs and just doing day-to-day things. It’s a nice feeling and I doubt we’ll get it in any other cities this summer, which in a way is too bad. Elie and I are having a terrific time here in London and we’re going to miss our “home away from home” here at Jon’s. But we’re also eager to meet the rest of our tour and to see more cities and sites. Oh, and also to find some sunshine – it’s been rainy and cold almost every day we’ve been here so far.
Hope everyone’s doing well.