Day 34: London, England

The boys were really not feeling well today. I was feeling much better, but still not entirely well. We were trying to get our money’s worth of the London Passes we bought so we decided to do the Hop On Hop Off Bus tour with the Big Bus Co (I think). London is loaded with free things to do, so in the future I doubt I will buy a London Pass. It was nice to not have to stand in the ticket line at St. Paul’s and the Tower, though. 

The HoHo (as it is called) was really informative. We chose a bus with a live guide. I learned so much in the hour we were on it. When we reached the Tower we got off the bus and got on the Thames River Cruise (included with the London Pass). We took a half hour ride down the Thames to Westminster Abbey, again learning interesting facts.

Westminster Abbey and the entire area was super crowded. The wait to get in was over 2 hours long. We were hungry and decided we didn’t want to wait in line that long, so we left and headed to the same Piccadilly courtyard we had lunch in yesterday. Only today, there were no food vendors. There was an art display instead. We went to the Whole Foods nearby and grabbed Food instead.

From there we headed to The Handel and Hendrix Houses Museum. It was neat to see where these two artists lived (next door to each other, 200 years apart). I especially enjoyed the information on Hendrix’s record collection.

From there we walked to Grosvenor Park, where Jack creamed Edon on a large chessboard set up there. 

We walked to Hyde Park next, but the section we came to was closed off for a showing of the World Cup Game for 30,000 lucky folks who got tickets out of the 500,000 who tried. We decided to head back to SoHo to see if we could find a pub to watch England play. 

Most of the pubs were only letting folks 18+ inside. We ended up going into a pub across the street from

our hostel. A bouncer arrived later and once the game started he had to turn people away because it was at capacity. The kids didn’t get thrown out, but Edon and Ezi weren’t feeling well and left at halftime to watch the game at the hostel instead. Most of the patrons by us in the pub where tourists. The other end of the pub had English patrons who sang some cheerleading type songs that were new to me. After the game folks were so quietly disappointed as compared to US sports fans. 

Sadly, we said goodbye to Jack and Adi as they had an early flight to catch to the US.