God Save The Queen ... The Tower of London ... plus a little mayhem

The Tower Bridge over the Thames River in London

You can't go wrong in London, the British know how to do the tourism thing ... it's always good 

    We set off early today on the train into London with the relatives here for a day of sightseeing.  We have spent some time here already and we were excited about going into downtown London to see the sights. 

    We took the train into the city and landed in the St Pancras station (shown below), which has been restored costing several tens of millions of British pounds.  Worth the money if you ask me.

    St Pancras station contains the famous statue, commonly known as "the kiss".  It's hard to tell from the picture, but it's about sixty feet tall.  

    Our primary goal was to visit Buckingham Palace, and we walked there initially to have lunch with the Queen, but she was busy.  That makes three strikes for us, we missed the Pope in Rome, George Clooney in Lake Como, and now Queen Elizabeth.  Not for lack of effort.
    We did have lunch, in the park, and we had a lot of laughs.  It was a nice day.  The picture below shows us, minus a couple of relatives ...  You can see the Palace in the background.   

   There was a bunch of stuff going on at the Palace - like TV shows - this one from Sweden.  

    We next went to visit the Tower of London, shown below.  The name is somewhat misleading, it's really a castle with several towers.     But it is really well done, and this place contains the priceless Crown Jewels (at which they forbid you to take pictures) hence, no pictures of the insanely ornate diamond encrusted selection of world class jewels. 

    The Tower is an amazing museum, and again, very well done.  

The picture below shows the medieval armor selection which was very extensive.  They also had a selection of instruments and methods of torture, always a crowd favorite ... 

    And then we went to visit St Paul's Cathedral, but by the time we got there late in the day, it was closed.  So we got a picture and bought a t-shirt ... not really, but we did shop nearby for clothing.  

Check out the iconic double decker bus.  

     We had dinner at an Italian place there in the East End, and caught the train home.  The picture below shows us crossing the Thames River on the train at sunset.  We arrived home at around 9:30 after a hilarious and disruptive train ride.  (more on that later)

**** Okay, so here is a follow up to the mention of the crazy train ride home.  We were hanging out with the family and we sort of commandeered one end of the train car and started playing really amateur and goofy games making them up as we go.  
     The primary instigators of mischief and mayhem were the two little ones, Jessica and Emily ... and me.  We were telling silly potty jokes and we all couldn't stop laughing, much to the dismay of commuters heading home for the weekend.  Haven't laughed this much in a long time. 

     Nephew Paul McLaughlin caught this moment on camera ...

     Example of totally silly joke:  
     
     Me (in a high falsetto fake British accent) "I think I need to go to the Loo (British slang for the toilet) and do a Winnie!"
     Everyone else: "A Winnie?  What's that?"
     Me: "You know ... Winnie the pooh!"
     BWA HA HA HA HA HA!