London!

This is my 4th trip to London.   And I still love this city.   I realized it's been almost 20 years since I've been here....   Last trip was a "girls weekend", very last minute, with Jill (who was living in Verona at the time) and Stacey (who was in NY State.)   We spent a 4 day weekend cramming as much in as we could.

This time I'm here with a husband and 2 kids.   Different experience.   That said - it's a great city.   We're enjoying some of the same things - London Walks,  theater (or theatre as they spell it here), and the easy access to everywhere with the tube.

We're staying in the Bayswater neighborhood near Hyde Park.  This is a tourist friendly neighborhood with TWO tube stations: Bayswater (Circle and District lines) and Queensway (Central line).  It also has a Tesco express and Sainsbury grocery store.  This last is important because London is EXPENSIVE... and we're eating most meals in the apartment to save money.

We started the week with a London Walks tour of the Tower of London (pics below).  Great guide and great way to start the week.   Monday we went on another tour of the legal/court system of London (not as good as the tower).   We also hung out in Hyde Park.  Yesterday we did "high tea" and the theater... or would have, Piero managed to pick up a bug so Lou and Rigo went to the Old Vic for "High Society" and Piero and I went home after tea...  Let's just say Piero wasn't faking and there is a very unhappy employee at the Queensway tube station that had to clean up a mess.  (Poor employee, poor Piero, and thankful we didn't force him to go to the show.)

Today, Lou went to the British museum and later, Rigo and I went to another London Walk - Harry Potter's film locations.  

Tomorrow we're planning on taking a tour boat up to Greenwich and check out the Royal Observatory.  We'll hopefully have dinner at Borough Market - one of the two sites of the pub in Harry Potter movies.

Here are the pics from London so far:

Ceiling detail at tower of london - the circles (prior to being filled in) were used to poor boiling water and/or thrust spears down on "visitors" trapped in the entry gates.

London Eye in the background... we considered going on it - but the price and multi  hour lines changed our minds.