England - Days 7 & 8 - The Last Hurrah

By the time day 7 came around, we were nearing the end of our trip. Which meant two things - we were sad to be almost leaving England, but REALLY excited to see Lydia again!! We had FaceTimed with her a few times, but I was anxious to give her a big hug and a kiss again. It's crazy how much you can miss your little ones.

With only a day and a half left, we had a lot of stuff still to see. Our first stop was Platform 9 and 3/4! We LOOOVE Harry Potter! We have a Harry Potter marathon at least once a year, and have both read all the books. I've read them all 3 times. On the cruise we went on with Dave's family last Christmas, they had Harry Potter trivia and I only got beat by 1 little kid. He knew one answer that I didn't. That darn kid! Haha. And, thanks to Dave's brother Brock who went to Harry Potter land in Florida, we had wands that we took all the way across the ocean just for a photo op at Kings Cross Station. Dave had Dumbledore's wand (which is also the Elder Wand! Watch out!!) and I had Fleur Delacour's. It was pretty awesome.

We took the tube straight to Kings Cross Station, and found Platform 9 3/4 right away. I guess we should have assumed it would be touristy, but we were surprised just how touristy it actually was. There were workers there and a queue to stand in to wait to get your picture taken. We got there pretty early, so there weren't very many people in front of us. The workers there supplied wands and scarves for the pictures. Of course they wanted you to buy their pictures that they took, but they were really good about letting you take your own pictures. The worker that was helping us was SOO hyper. I don't think I've ever talked with a more hyper person in my life. I think he might have been a little high on something - I couldn't tell. But either way, he was a treat to work with. :) He definitely kept us laughing the entire time.  

He would hold our scarves for us so it looked like we were actually running into the platform. He was so hyper but so nice!

We had a little Wizards Duel while we were there. No big deal. 

Outside of King's Cross Station, there is another station called St. Pancras, that was made to look like the outside of King's Cross Station in the Chamber of Secrets movie. Remember when Ron and Harry take the flying car from the station because the platform has been sealed off for them? That's the one!

This picture is from a different angle, but  still the same building.

After sufficiently "geeking out" at Kings Cross Station, we then went to the British Library. The British Library has a super cool collection of old books, papers, and manuscripts that were very influential in British history. We couldn't take any pictures (of course), but we saw some really amazing things in there. For example: A Gutenburg bible (the first book printed in Europe using movable type), Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, a 1623 edition of Shakespeare's plays, manuscripts of Beowulf - the first British literary masterpiece, an original section from Jane Austen's Persuasion written in her own hand, and music manuscripts by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and...the Beatles! It was so neat to see an original copy of Handel's Messiah, and then see Paul McCartney's scribbles of music and lyrics for Michelle, Yesterday, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand. The British library is seriously a treasure trove of British historical artifacts.

Just outside the library is this statue of Isaac Newton, which represents the library's purpose: "to gather all knowledge and promote our endless search for truth".

Our next stop may have been my most anticipated stop in all of London. It is going to sound totally nerdy, but I am kind of obsessed with the BBC mini-series Sherlock. I have a HUGE crush on Benedict Cumberbatch (by the way - is that not THE most British sounding name you've ever heard?? Benedict Cumberbatch!). I don't even know how many times I have watched the entire 3 season series of Sherlock. I just love it SOOO much. If you haven't seen it, then you must get on that right away. It's a modern version of Sherlock Holmes, and the writers are SO clever and creative with how they weave the classic elements of the original Sherlock Holmes into modern day London. We got to see the outside of the flat (apartment) where they filmed the series. The location of the flat isn't actually on Baker Street, but they make it look like it is in the series. The little cafe next to their apartment is called Speedy's, and you see it in almost all of the shots they show of the outside of 221B. I was secretly (or not so secretly, if you ask Dave) hoping that when we got to the flat, they would be filming and I would get to see Benedict Cumberbatch in action. That would have been my dream come true! It didn't happen, but a girl can dream, can't she!?  Hahaha.

See!? There are my guys! Sherlock and John waiting to go inside of 221B, right outside of Speedy's! 

Somebody actually lives in the flat, so I tried not to be too annoying, but it was kind of hard. I was just so excited!!

My all-time favorite consulting detective and his best mate standing in the same spot I was!

I was basically freaking out the entire time here. After I touched that knocker I just kept saying things like, "Oh my gosh Dave! I just touched the same knocker that Benedict Cumberbatch touched!! We have touched the same thing!" and "What if he comes out of this door RIGHT NOW!?" and "I am standing in the same spot that Benedict Cumberbatch has been on. We have walked on the same ground!" Anyway - you get the idea. 

We were the only ones outside of this flat taking pictures, which was fun to not feel like a tourist again for a minute. While we were taking pictures, this cute old man walked out of Speedy's and started chatting with us. He had a real thick British accent that was tough to understand, but he just kept going on and on about how he was just a silly old British man who liked to bet on horse races on the weekend. He told us several times that he was headed to catch a train to some other city to watch the horse races.  He was talking about 90 miles a minute, and we could barely get a word in to at least show him we were listening. At one point, he told us that when he was born, his parents just wanted to throw him into the Thames River and be rid of him. What are we supposed to say to that!? Good thing he talked so much, so we really didn't get a chance to even respond. As he was getting ready to leave, he said good-bye, then turned around and said, "I'm doing pretty good for a 86 year old, don't you think!?" He was totally cracking us up. He was definitely the most energetic 86 year old I've ever met.

I tried to loiter as long as I could outside of Sherlock's flat, you know, just in case he happened to walk by, but we had other places we needed to be, so we had to be getting a move on. Our next stop was the British Museum. Holy smokes. It is GIGANTIC. There was a time in history where "the sun never set on the British empire". They ruled 1/4th of the world in the 19th century, and during that time they collected art, relics, statues, and anything else they could get their hands on, from all of their different colonies. Most of these artifacts are now in the British Museum. Whether or not you feel like Britain "robbed" other countries and took things that didn't really belong to them, it's nice to know that these artifacts are safely put in a museum for people to admire for years to come. You could spend an entire day in the museum and still barely have scratched the surface. It is really, truly overwhelming. Luckily, we had a great Rick Steves' guide that showed us the highlights. It still took 2 hours just to skim the surface!

The first section of our tour was all about Egypt. Egypt was one of the world's first civilizations, and they ruled for 2,000 years with hardly any change in government, religion, or the arts. America has been around for about 250 years, and look how much it has changed since its discovery. Imagine 2,000 years of the SAME. THING. That is so long!!

The Rosetta Stone. This is by far the coolest thing in the museum. This stone was found in 1799, and allowed Egyptian hieroglyphics to be decoded. The stone has the same inscription recorded in three different languages - Hieroglyphics, Medieval Egyptian, and Greek. Because of this stone, we now have insight into the ancient Egyptian world. 

This is a statue of Ramses II, the Pharaoh that wouldn't let Moses' people go. This statue weighs 7 tons and was taken from a temple in Thebes.

This isn't really anything special, but I loved it. It is basically a family portrait painted for an Egyptian family. There is the dad hunting food to provide for the family, the mom is in the corner making baskets and cooking the food, and the little girl is playing beneath her dad's legs. The hieroglyphics read the name of the family. Isn't that cute?? A little family picture - Egyptian style. 

This is a fragment of the beard of the Great Sphinx in Cairo. Remember how it is missing a goatee? Well, this fragment is only about three percent of said goatee. Talk about huge! 

We saw many more things in the Egypt section, but I don't want to bore anybody. :) After Egypt, we moved on to ancient Assyria. Honestly, the Assyrian history was a little bit lost on me, even still. It's a time in history that has always sort of confused me. There were a lot of cool things to see though, even if I didn't quite understand everything I was seeing.

These giant stone lions guarded the Assyrian palace in what is now Iraq. They were made to represent how the Assyrian rulers had the strength of lions, wings of eagles, and the brain of a man. Also the beard of ZZ Top.

After Assyria, we headed to ancient Greece. Again, it seemed like there were a million things to look at, but what was most impressive in this section are the pieces from the Parthenon. The actual Parthenon is still in Athens, but many of the best sculptures from it are in the British Museum. They have almost all of the statues that were on the very front of the Parthenon, in the triangle section above the columns, as well as the engravings that went all around the temple, just underneath the triangle section. These are called The Frieze.

This is what the actual Parthenon looks like now. 

One of the statues

There are 56 relief panels here that were once surrounding the Parthenon. They tell the story of how Athens came to be. 

We ate lunch at the museum while we people-watched and enjoyed the neat architecture of the building. This was in the atrium where we ate lunch. Isn't it a cool ceiling?

After the British Museum, we had a little bit of extra time, so we decided to make a quick, unplanned stop at Baker Street and Abbey Road, which were both relatively close to where we were. I'm so glad we did, because I felt like we needed to see the real 221B Baker Street if we were going to claim we did Sherlock Holmes justice while in London. And how many people can say they've walked across Abbey Road, the same as the Beatles did, almost 50 years ago? Well, a whole gaggle of Chinese kids that were in front of us can.

This was what the Underground looked like at Baker Street. Isn't it fun!? With all those silhouettes of Sherlock Holmes?? I was glad that we stopped, if it was only to see that!

The Real 221B!! It is now a Sherlock Holmes museum, which would have been fun, I'm sure, but we didn't have time. This guy was all dressed up admitting people to the museum, and he agreed to be in our picture. 

They have these little blue signs all over flats in London, showing you what famous/influential people lived there. I love that Sherlock Holmes got one, even though he is fictional. He's that much a part of London. It says, "221b. Sherlock Holmes. Consulting Detective. 1881-1904."

Sherlock Holmes. My favorite detective!

Getting to Abbey Road was really fun. It was for sure off the beaten London path, and in a really beautiful area. It was really clean and really quiet too, which is kind of rare in London.

Trying to re-create the famous walk

The Beatles original album cover

It worked better when I could take the picture myself, but that meant only one of us could be in it. Still fun to say that we've walked where the Beatles so famously had before us.

Because Abbey Road was in such a quiet, tucked away area, we decided that would be a good place for Dave to find a geocache. We never found that one we looked for in Covent Garden, and so we didn't want to leave without finding one. This one was relatively close to the tube, and a quick, easy find. My favorite. :)

My Dad is so proud right now. He is the ultimate geocacher. 

 After Baker Street and Abbey Road, we hopped back on the tube for Central London. We wanted to make a quick stop at the National Portrait Gallery. This gallery is strictly portraits of famous/infamous/influential Brits. Jane Austen has a portrait there, that was painted by her sister Cassandra. It is considered to be the most accurate depiction of her. I bought a replica at the Jane Austen center, but I wanted to see the real thing. It was beautiful. 

I was so happy to see it! My Jane!!

She's just cute, huh??

And we found one for Dave. Winston Churchill. The old bulldog himself. 

We stopped for dinner at The Chandos, a little pub just off of Trafalgar Square. We had a not so great experience with a pub earlier in our trip, but Dave still hadn't had any good fish and chips. We wanted to make sure he got to experience that, and The Chandos supposedly had really great fish and chips. We sort of knew what to do in a pub now, and it ended up being really great. The food was WAY yummy. Dave loved his fish and chips, and I was excited that his experience was better than those scary fried sardines in Stow-on-the-Wold.

He was so excited about his meal. It was fun to sit in the window-sill and overlook Trafalgar Square. It was a nice break. 

Our last stop before our show for the night was Harrods. Harrods is London's most famous and most touristy department store. It covers 4 acres, and has 7 floors of retail. Anything you could ever want is there. Seriously. From clothes, to cupcakes, to caviar, to computers, to toys, to furniture, to restaurants - everything. It was so much fun just to walk around and see everything. There are hardly any words to even describe it. Dave was just saying the whole time, "I can't believe this place!" It was way too expensive for our taste, but fun to window shop anyway. Dave and I love the show The Paradise, which is about an old English department store. Harrods was exactly like the show, with workers in each section demo-ing their products and showing you the best the store has to offer.

Harrods is that long orangish-brownish building with all the flags. It's massive, right!? 4 acres!!!

Just in case you've ever wanted a chocolate shaped like a Pharaoh. They sell them at Harrods. 

Dave was DYING at this. This little can of caviar cost more than our entire trip to England!!! Who would pay 3,750 pounds for CAVIAR!?? 

We were mostly captivated by the food, obviously. :) But they had cupcakes decorated for the new royal baby, Princess Charlotte. Isn't that darling??

And yes, they even have a Disney Cafe. We wanted to eat here so badly, but we were already full and it cost more than we could ever dream of paying. It was amazing though. They had it all decorated like Peter Pan, since the beginning of that show takes place in London.

On the bottom level of Harrods is a beautiful memorial to Princess Diana. Ever since he was little, Dave has had a fascination with Princess Diana. So we had to make sure we saw the memorial for him. 

While we were on total and complete sensory overload from all of the things at Harrods, we realized it was time for us to head over to St. Martin's Theater. 

Can you even handle the tube?? This was the stop as we were trying to leave Harrods. It took us a few different trains to finally get on one. London is crazy! 

We were seeing Mouse Trap, an Agatha Christie murder mystery that evening. She is an amazing British author, and her show The Mousetrap is the world's longest running play. It has been playing for 63 years, since 1952. It had its 25,000th show in November 2012. So - we thought it would be a fun one to go see - something that's been running that long had to be good, right!? It was awesome. The actors were amazing. I was captivated and on the edge of my seat the entire time. We had our suspicions of "who-dunnit", but it was so fun not to know who the real culprit was until right at the very end. I love mysteries (think Sherlock Holmes, haha), and Mouse Trap was every bit as good as it was cracked up to be.

It was really late by the time the show got out, but we wanted to stop and see Piccadilly Circus at night since it was our last night in London. It has a giant times square-esque flashing billboard, that gives it a trendy feel. It was fun to see the big billboard, but after being there for a few minutes, we had smelled so much pot that we were both starting to get headaches. We decided to call it a night and head back to our hotel.

The next morning was our last day in England. We were bummed about that, but also so ready to get home to see Lydia again. We were missing her like crazy! We spent a little bit of time packing up our suitcases and getting everything ready to go, and then we were off to the Imperial War Museum. 

Here is Dave in his high heaven, outside the Imperial War Museum with WWII naval guns behind him. :)

The Imperial War Museum was created by the same people that had done the Churchill War Rooms. Remember how awesome that museum was? We were excited to see how the Imperial War Museum compared with the Churchill War Rooms, and Dave had read up about how there was an amazing WWII exhibit. Well, it turns out that the WWII exhibit had just gone off display, so Dave was really bummed about that. They had a few little mini-exhibits about WWII and other wars, but they had a super cool WWI exhibit though that made up for the lack of WWII ones. I learned so much about WWI - more than I ever learned in history class or anywhere else.

Soldiers would put these signs up in their bunkers during WWI to remind them of home and of the brutality of the war. You can see Piccadilly Circus and Tattenham Corner, and then also Suicide Corner and Hell Fire Corner. 

This is a life preserver and blouse from a woman aboard the Lusitania. The Germans sunk the Lusitania which had American civilian passengers aboard, and this is basically what propelled America into WWI.

Here is Dave playing with all of the little interactive exhibits the museum had. He loved it!

He's a pretty mean looking WWI soldier, don't you think? Haha.

"The Trench Experience". A little walk through what a bunker would have looked, felt, and sounded like.

This Eagle was standing on top of a building in Berlin and was taken down after the war was over.

 After the museum, we hopped on the tube to Kensington Palace and took a leisurely walk through Hyde Park, and back to Buckingham Palace again so we could see it when there weren't a million people crowding us. Kensington Palace has been home to different members of the royal family throughout the years. It is currently home to William and Kate. I kept hoping we'd get to catch a glimpse of them, but we never did. Darn it! Dave was really excited for this stop though, because it used to be the home of Diana and Charles. Remember how he has a fascination with Diana? After she died, the place was FLOODED with flowers in memory of her. Dave remembers watching coverage of it on TV, and felt kind of surreal standing where all those flowers were placed years ago. We didn't go inside of Kensington, we just walked around the grounds outside.

Kensington Palace now...

...and then. Crazy huh??

We stopped for a quick potty break at Kensington, and cracked up at these bathroom signs. Aren't they funny?? 

They have these fun chairs all around the lake in Hyde Park for people to just lounge out and take a nap in. We sat and relaxed for a few minutes, and it was fun to just watch the ducks on the lake and take in Kensington for a minute.

 We walked around Hyde Park for awhile and imagined early missionaries from our church preaching the gospel to the Brits in the park. The park is beautiful - endless walkways covered by shady trees. It was nice to not feel rushed, but to be able to casually stroll around the park with my favorite guy. :)

Just outside Hyde Park is a memorial to Prince Albert. His wife Victoria was so heartbroken when he died, that she had memorials built to honor him all over England. This particular one is massive and feels almost like a shrine to a God.

Across the street from the Prince Albert memorial is Royal Albert Hall. Kind of like the Carnegie Hall of London. We didn't have time to go inside, just stopped for a quick picture outside.

Our last stop in Hyde Park was at the Princess Diana Memorial Fountains. It is a little splash pad type thing for kids and families to come and play and enjoy themselves as they remember the princess. 

We caught our last double decker bus of the trip back to Buckingham Palace. They were so fun to ride around the town in.

We loved the flags lining the street up to Buckingham Palace. 

A little better view of Buckingham Palace. Still a lot of people there, but not nearly as many as before. It was nice to be able to breathe there this time. :)

After Buckingham, we had to head back to our hotel, get our bags, and hop on the tube back to the airport. We were running a little bit late, and I was getting a little very nervous about making it on time. Luckily we did, with about 20 minutes to spare. Thank heavens! We had a great flight back to America on our favorite airline - Virgin Atlantic. We loved it so much! We did not have a great experience at the JFK airport though. I guess since we were coming through customs internationally, we had to re-check our bags in at the gate before we could go through security. However, our flight got in at 10:00 p.m. and the delta check-in didn't open until 4 a.m. Our flight left at 6 in the morning. So we had 6 hours before we could get to our gate. We were EXHAUSTED and wanted nothing more than to drop our bags off, get to our gate and try to sleep for a little bit. It didn't quite work out though, and the only place we could find to sit was in a tiny little area where arrivals to JFK were to be picked up. We were so tired, and so we tried to sleep sitting in our chairs, but we hardly got any rest at all. We would fall asleep for 20 minutes or so, and wake up and see a giant group of Hasidic Jews. Then we'd fall back asleep and wake up in another 20 minutes and there was a different group of Hasidic Jews. Then Dave woke up once to find a giant black man sleeping on his shoulder. I think it was the worst night of sleep I've ever had.

We looked and felt like crap. We just wanted to get home!!

After 22 hours of travel and a 7 hour time change, we were finally home. Lydia was SO excited to see us at the airport, and we were beyond happy to see her. We had the BEST trip ever to England. We got to see so many new things, learned so many new things, and got to experience some really amazing things. We love to travel - obviously, and I'm so glad we had the opportunity to go to England. It was the trip of a lifetime, and there's no one I would have rather shared it with than Dave. We have the best adventures together.

Until next time, Europe! We'll see you in France in a few years!