August 4th–London

 

We left Boston’s Logan airport at 7:45pm on Virgin Atlantic (we half qualified, we were flying over the Atlantic).  We arrived six hours and five minutes later at 6:50am.   Nancy upgraded us to seats with a little more leg room, and the plane was only half full, so we ended up with two seats each.   But it was still not enough to really stretch out and get a good nights sleep, nor did we have the time, but we managed to get in a few winks.  

The lines getting through customs were very long, and it probably took us a good half hour.  It was just like being in a serpentine line at a popular ride at Disney.

We than took the Heathrow express train to Paddington Station in London.  This is a picture of Nancy in the train station beside our train. 

Our hotel is only about a block from the station.  We dropped off are bags and took the subway to the Tower of London.  The place is huge!  This picture of Nancy in front of the Tower Bridge gives you a clue of how are morning went – fairly steady rain.  

We saw the crown jewels, absolutely gorgeous but we could not take pictures in that area  A video of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth streams as we wound our way to the jewel vault.  The diamonds and other jewels are so sparkly!!    We were able to take pictures of the armor.  It looks so uncomfortable.  We saw the armor for Henry VIII when he was slim and later when he had become more portly.  We had lunch at a café at the Tower and took the tube over to the British Museum.   It is also huge!  The main item we wanted to see was the Rosetta stone.

 

No one was able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.   The Egyptians used pictures, so everyone assumed the picture represented a word, but it did not make sense.  The Rosetta stone had the same text written in three languages, two of which were known.   It was then realized that the pictures actually were letters to spell words, and they had a fair text to start translating from the Rosetta Stone.  We also saw this wonderful statue of Rameses the Great.

Other wonderful exhibits included Assyrian statues and reliefs and statues from the Parthenon.

By three we were exhausted, and took the tube back to our hotel. The Cardiff is an old hotel beside a  lovely park.  Our room is on the third floor in Britain, 4th floor in the states, no elevator.  Roger tour guide and tube planner extraordinaire, also served as busboy, lugging the 40lb. suitcases up the narrow winding stairs to our very basic room.  The air conditioning consists of a fan and open window, very nice.  It is a quiet neighborhood with lots of ethnic restaurants and Paddington station close by.  This evening we enjoyed a proper British meal in a nearby pub, fish and chips and a tender tasty beef rib with ale and gin and tonics, yum.  Dessert was a cup of Ben and Jerry’s from a convenience store near the hotel. Now we are finalizing our blog before we have our well deserved sleep.  So far we have experienced London in the rain with seas of multicolored umbrellas and are becoming seasoned tube riders.  Tomorrow, Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and the Harry Potter Walking Tour….