2004.09.05 in London

Had our usual free breakfast again and headed off to Buckingham Palace. All these major London attractions are asking for admission fees of about £10 each - that would severely cut into our budget so we just couldn't go into these places. Instead, hopefully our pictures will say enough about them... While at the Palace, we were looking for those Royal Guards with the big black hat but they were far behind a fence so we went looking for other locations - we found one outside St. James' Palace but you wouldn't want to test out the theory of doing something stupid to the guy - he was carrying an M-16 it looked like. Afterwards we walked over to Piccadilly Circus to check out the British Visitor Centre and we then spent an hour at the free National Gallery museum. This was located at Trafalgar Square and we saw some riders in the Tour of Britain race that went by. Then we tried to go to Harrod's but it was closed (on Sunday!) so we went to the Natural History Museum and then back to Victoria (our home base) for some real fish and chips and pints of Stella Artois. After a late lunch we went to this thing called the Marble Arch but it wasn't anything special so we chilled out at nearby Hyde Park for the rest of the afternoon.

Interesting notes: Hyde Park is ginormous and a popular place for people to chillax, roller skate/blade, play football, and people-watch; there were 2 lines of the Tube (London Underground) that were down all weekend but the other routes were able to handle them; in every 'circus' or 'square' we saw, people were just relaxing and doing nothing - it was great!