UK 2013 Day 3 London

Day 3 – Monday, June 10 2013: London
Our first full day started with breakfast in the basement of the hotel. They had 5-6 tables set up in view of the kitchen, with boxes of dry cereal and pitchers of milk, juice, and water on the side board along with some fresh fruit. In the kitchen they served up traditional English breakfast with eggs to order, baked beans, and baked tomato, with toast delivered in a toast caddy to your table.

Breakfast over, we grabbed our stuff and walked over to the Marble Arch Underground station and made our way over to Westminster. We spent a half hour or so walking around to see Big Ben and Parliament Square before queuing up to see Westminster Abbey. We made use of the self-guided narration headsets they offer to tour around. I had downloaded a self-tour document pre-trip, but for some reason we didn’t use it. Not sure why. Between queuing and touring we spent about 90 minutes here, getting out around 11AM.
While standing in line at Westminster Abbey we had this view of St. Margaret's Church, which dates from the early 1500's.
At one point, "The Boys" went over to look at the Churchill statue.  You can see Winnie in the background, looking like he's shuffling off to Big Ben.
From the abbey we proceeded up Parliament Street heading toward Nelson’s Column, passing the Horse Guard on the way.
A member of the Household Cavalry stands sentinel outside the Horse Guards.  For at least today, London was safe from marauding tourists.
We approach Trafalgar Square and the statue to Admiral Lord Nelson.  Little did we know that a horrible lunch was lying in ambush just a block or two away.
Our lunch plan was to go to Garfunkel’s – which was dreadful and I won’t say any more about it.  We did look around at a lot of the displays at Trafalgar Square before eating, however.
Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson.  Note his missing right lower arm, lost in battle.  Kids, didn't I tell you not to play with cannonballs?
How they established lengths before getting all science-y about it...
Following our very poor lunch we re-traced our steps on Parliament Street until we reached the Churchill Cabinet War Rooms.  This was something Eileen and I had toured on our honeymoon trip and found fascinating.  It was no surprise that I liked it, as I’m a huge reader of WWII history – but Eileen also enjoyed it.  Robert was starting to express his own interest in history, so we decided to make a return visit so the boys could enjoy this, too – which they did.  I didn’t take any pictures as I still had memories from our visit in 1998.

From here we meandered through St. James Park and enjoyed a glimpse of Buckingham Palace, some of the fountains and, ultimately, some refreshment.
A view from St. James Park, with Buckingham Palace in the background and a swan (or goose or duck...oh, heck...let's just call it a "swimmy birdy") photo-bombing in the foreground.
An "eat-y Robert" dives into a snack in St. James Park.
We then hopped onto the Piccadilly Line to go a few stops and get off at South Kensington, from where we walked over to the Science Museum.  We love science museums, but five years later none of us can remember a lot about our visit here.  What we do recall is that it was a bit flashier and wasn’t as interactive as we expected.  We ended our touring day around 6PM or so, which left us in South Kensington for dinner.

Dinner that night was at an Italian restaurant called Pierino.  The restaurant had an interesting feature in that the brick pizza oven was on the street-level floor, but the kitchen was apparently in the basement and food was set up through a dumb-waiter.  As I recall, we had a couple of pizzas and some pasta dishes between the four of us and thoroughly enjoyed the meal.  A bus ride returned us to Marble Arch where we made our way back to the hotel.


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