Katy in London

Inspired by the book 'Katie in London' by James Mayhew, given to our Katy from UK friends a few years ago, we decided to do our own day trip to London. For the many of you that aren't as familiar as we are with this book it's about Katie, her brother and Grandmother who visit London. While in Trafalgar Square the Grandmother nods off sitting on a park bench watching the children climb on the lion. The lion suddenly comes alive and takes the children on a tour of the sites of London - St Paul's Cathedral, Tower of London, Tower Bridge, cruises up the river on a boat to the London Eye, past Number 10, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Harrods to name a few.....

Leaving our flat at 8am, we caught our first double decker bus into town, walked the kilometre to the train station and were on the 9.30am train bound for London.

Our train pulled into Paddington Station at 10.30am and our first port of call was to visit the Paddington Bear Statue. We did a lap before spotting the little bronze statue hidden amongst the tourists. We had planned a loop that could be shortened or lengthened depending on everyones mood and the weather during the day. First was to catch the underground to Tower Hill which proved to be a challenge with track works on the two lines we'd planned to use. Another lap of Paddington Station before we found ourselves on our way. After a change of lines we did reach the Tower of London.




 The Tower of London is a very popular tourist spot so we spent a bit of time in queues...to get tickets, to get into the gate, to look at the crown jewels and look through the exhibits at White Tower. Like many tourist attractions, the girls get pretty restless and won't let you read all about the history. I'm sure you could spent a whole day there learning about English history, however after a few hours we were more than ready to catch a boat to our next destination - London Eye.

Turned out to be perfect timing as we walked straight on to a boat about to depart. While we cruised down the Thames River for 30mins, we were given a great commentary on the various important buildings and sites all while eating our lunch and resting our weary legs!

Standing at 135 meters tall and with a diameter of 120 metres, the London Eye was the largest ferris wheel when erected in 2000 but has since been surpassed by the Singapore Flyer. The ferris wheel has 32 ovoid capsules, representing each London Borough and each are able to hold 25 people. Carrying over 10,000 tourists per day it's a pretty busy place.  Even though we pre-purchased our tickets online, we still had to wait in a rather large queue for our ride.Thanks to Nana and Grandad who actually bought us the tickets for our birthdays.

The ride itself takes approximately 30 minutes to complete one revolution, with 360 views over London.  We could identified many iconic places. Of course both girls were happily snapping away during the ride. It seems Katy was taken with all the metal framework while Ella was focussed on the happenings below especially the river craft!! A selection of their photos are below - Katy's on the left, Ella's on the right.

 

We disembarked from the Eye to discover a playground in Jubilee Park! We had a 15min break here before commencing the next section of our journey, walking across Hungerford Bridge to Trafalgar Square. The clouds gathered and raindrops appeared as we approached the square, so it was decided to have a coffee in the ideally located Waterstone's Bookshop to wait out the shower.

Trafalgar Square was built to commemorate the victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, with Nelson's Column honouring Admiral Horatio Nelson who died. At the base of the Column sat the lion - not one but four! Our intentions were to have a photo with the girls on the lion's back, however we soon realised this would no be possible. Each lion is approximately 6 m long and 6.7m high and place on top of 2+m high granite blocks. Hence we compromised with sitting in the lions lap.

As it was only 3pm by this stage and the girls were holding it together, we walked down the Mall toward St James's Park. Once inside the safe confines of the park, the girls burnt off some of their energy trying out the deck chairs and photographing flowers and brides(?) As they were wrapped up enjoying themselves, it meant there were no complaints about walking the kilometre or so down to Buckingham Palace. For me going along the Mall brought back 10 year old memories of finishing the London Marathon!

 
Buckingham Palace was looking splendid as ever with flower beds bursting with colour. We spotted the two Queens guards which according to the white and green plume on their bearskin hat are from Welsh Guard Regiment. Now we had well and truly missed the changing of the guards ceremony which occurs at 11.30am most days, but were lucky enough to see the guards complete a few robot walk laps to get their blood flowing again. Apparently the Queen it seems was not in residence because when she is there are four guards on duty.

From Buckingham Palace we made our way across Green Park to the underground. Picked up some sushi for dinner at Paddington Station before embarking on the journey home. We were impressed that the girls handle the 11 hour day without any major meltdowns. In fact they were still happy and skipping from the bus stop to home!