A Bike Ride through London!

Robyn's one request was to do the Fat Tire Bike Tour. The Thames one only ran on Thurs-Sat., so we did the Royal Parks one instead.

Instead of bells to let people know when we were coming, we had these little guys who made squeeky bath toy noises. It was awesome..lol

I was not talented enough to take photos while riding my bike, so all the shots you will see are taken while I was not on them. Robyn on the other hand, was quite the multi-tasker.

Break for lunch at Trafalgar Square

All of our squeakers!

This is the back of 10 Downing Street where the Prime Minister lives (basically like the White House). Our tour guide told us the PM hasn't lived there for 2 years, but this was news to me, news to the guards with the machine guns, and the masses of people waiting outside the front gate... Not sure who to believe.

Old Admiralty Building at Horse Guards Parade. We obviously missed the parade of horses.

Also at the Horse Guards Parade. The building covered in vines is apparently a bomb-proof citadel built in 1940.

Our tour guide talking about Westminster Abbey

View of Whitehall roofs from a bridge in St. James's Park

Hyde Park

So after the tour, it was time for some soft serve ice cream with a flake!

Not sure what this was. Looked like a Buddhist temple in the middle of Kensington Park

Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Garden

We happened to take our tour on the 13th anniversary of Princess Diana's death (she dies August 31, 1997). This is her memorial fountain in Hyde Park. It was designed to be like a necklace to express her feminism and be interactive so that people would hang out in the area and not just view a statue and leave. There were tons of families sitting out around the area, and little kids enjoying the cool fresh water, so it seemed succesful to me.

Austrailian War Memorial in Hyde Park Corner to commemorate the 102,000 Austrailians who died in the First and Second War.

So at Hyde Park Corner, they have horse crossings! The buttons are of course like 6 feet tall so people on horses can reach them. We saw tons of horse poo in the road, but where in the world are these horses coming from?

Hold your horses! (sorry, couldn't resist)

St. James's Park-we walked the route the bike tour had taken us to get better photos

View from the same bridge as above in St. James's Park

Horse Guards Parade (on our walk-not bike ride)

A walk down Whitehall

Houses of Parliament from Southbank

So as you can see from this post, Robyn and I took the 11 a.m. Royal Parks Fat Tire bike tour. We started at Queensway, rode through Kensginton Park (stopped at Kensington Palace where Princess Diana had lived, but we couldnt see it as it was being renovated-lots of things are being renovated now so that they are all done in 2012 for the Olympics). Then we did the length of Kensginton Park passing the Serpentine Gallery, rode past The Serpentine (body of water in Hyde Park), through Hyde Park (via Hyde Park Corner), through Green Park, down The Mall passing St. James's Park, and over to Trafalgar Square where we breaked for lunch. From there we did the Horse Guards Parade (which I had never seen, well not recently) down to Westiminster Abbey, then back through the parks to Queensway. Surprisingly enough, I wasn't the worst bike rider in the group- one young kid ran into a wall. However, it was tough work to start and stop at the intersections. Luckily though, we spent very little time on the roads of London as they are CRAZY drivers and riding on the opposite side of the road is tricky!

After the tour, Robyn and I walked basically the intital route through the parks down to Westminster to get some pictures of the sun setting at Parliament. As she was leaving the next morning (at like 6), we wanted to do a nice sit down dinner, but by the time we got to that area, we were too exhuasted and starving to walk anymore to find somewhere. So we ended up eating Burger King at Waterloo train station (Robyn ate a bagel sandwich from somewhere else). So not quite the send-off I would have liked, but man if felt awesome to get home and go to bed that night.

A Touristy Day Indeed!

Start the day out with the London Eye!

County Hall and the Eye

I like lamps.

And tube signs. or really, just any signs!

Big Ben-check out the scaffolding behind it. Scaffolding ruins everything!

Protestrors protesting the war in front of Parliament

The sign says it all! (I think that's St. Margaret's Church there too)

Parliament

It's a rather large place...

Back of Westminster Abbey-I think?

Flying butresses!

Parliament again-with a lightpost!

Still Parliament...

One last shot of Ben

I believe this is Westminster Abbey. I've confused myself now though with St. Margaret's Church...It's like 1 a.m. here. I'm sleepy!

Definitely Westminster Abbey

I like the contrast of the old and new

Neat little clock-not quite as tall as Big Ben though

I want to see this play!

Kind of reminds me of an armadillo. no?

Not sure what this is, but in the middle of all of the ultra-modern glass curtain wall skyscrapers, it seemed not to fit-I like that.

Loved the look of this cute pub! Right in the middle of these super tall office buildings!

Victoria Station-good to know what it looks like. Might have to take a train from here one of these days!

I like street signs...

Lower Sloane Street-the whole street is lined with these red flats

So this day started out strange indeed. A very traumatic event happened when I was walking on my way to the tube station, but I won't write about it because it tends to tug at the heart strings a bit. So I made my way to Waterloo tube station because I had seen in the paper the day before that Anne Hathaway was filming a scene outside of Waterloo Station for a new movie. Well, they didn't seem to be filming anymore (always a day late-first Jennifer Aniston, now Anne Hathaway!), but then again, the train station (it also has a large national rail station attached) was huge, and for me to walk around to all parts of it would probably have been very difficult. From Waterloo, I walked to the London Eye. There seemed to be a lot more street perfomers there than I remembered (and tons more people). I saw another Jack Sparrow impersonator which may or may not have been the same one I saw at Covent Garden and a bad Michael Jackson impersonator (he looked nothing like MJ and I think everyone though it was in poor taste as he had no one around him). From the Lonodn Eye, I walked across Westminster Bridge to Parliament, Big Ben, and eventually Westminster Abbey.

I ended up on Victoria Street and mom and dad had told me of a travel agency just off of Victoria St. that I should visit to discuss our trip. It was quite a ways down, but I finally found it, and she gave some great advice-like going to Greece in October is not a good idea.

From here, I was still going strong, and decided to walk to Sloane Square. Once I finally got there, I actually felt pretty tired, and decided to get the 137 bus back to Bob's. Unfortunately, there was some malfunction on the bus, and it instead of dropping us off at Bob's Street (well not us-not everyone woudl have gotten off there), it terminated at Clapham Common Station. So I decided to finish off my day by doing the 30 minute walk to Bob's, and stopping in Tesco's to get some dinner. Is it sad that the express checker guy now knows me?haha