London, England

For those of you who are getting tired of my vacation photos, I am almost done!

We took a bus from Dover, where we disembarked the OP, to London where we stayed two nights before flying back to the good ole' U.S.A.
After ditching our luggage at the Grosvenor House hotel, a Marriott property right across the street from Hyde Park, we began our sight seeing tour of London, along with about a million other tourists, (or so it seemed).

We got tickets for 24 hours of the Hop on Hop off bus tours of London and that worked really well.  We rode the loop once to see the sights and get oriented and then we hopped off at the Tower of London.  We were told by our kids that we must go here to see the Crown Jewels.  It was quite an interesting place to tour, with many, many things to see in addition to the crown jewels.
Look at the designs along the walls and fireplace in this replicated room in the Tower of London.

Here is a view of the Tower Bridge, from the Tower of London.

We of course could not photograph the crown jewels, but they are AMAZING and worth seeing.  A line to get in, but it went pretty fast!

This is the closest we got to one of the guards - pretty fun!

A River Cruise on one of these ferries was included with our Hop on, Hop off ticket so we cruised along the River Thames to see the sites from that perspective.  In the background of this picture is the tall pointy building called The Shard because it looks like a shard of glass.

This is the London Eye.  We did not ride it - just didn't have the time really.  There is SO much to see and do in London, you could spend weeks there and still not see everything.  We just had two days, but for a small town girl like me, that was quite enough actually.  I think I can only take big cities in small bits at a time.

This is the Parliament building which is just fascinating architecturally.  It was probably one of my favorite buildings to look at and take pictures of, along with West Minster Abbey, which is just across the street.
We recognized this angle of the Parliament building from the Sherlock Holmes movie.

Here is Westminster Abbey.  My favorite, of all that we did in London.  There is so much history inside this church, it is overwhelming.  We took a self guided audio tour.

We also did a little shopping in the gift shop here and I found a tiny crown thimble!  On the case it says His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge, 22 July 2013 - our only Royal Baby souvenir!  I will have to post a picture of it because it is super cute.
I have a thimble collection, which by the way is a great thing to collect because they are cheap and small.  They don't take up a lot of room in your suitcase - or when you get them home!

Westminster Abbey is just beautiful.  I had seen it on TV - so fun to see it in person.
Other fun things we were able to do in London include:
- a quick walk through Harrod's Department Store
- a walk through Hyde Park (several times)
- a Kensington Gardens drive by (on the bus)
- a play on London's West End, the musical Matilda at the Cambridge Theater
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- a walk to check out Buckingham Palace
- Picadilly Circus