Monday March 26th

I woke up tired when the alarm went off this morning. I'm not surprised! We got up anyways, had breakfast, and were out of the hotel and off for the day by 9 am. No bad jet lag yet (fingers crossed). We wanted to see how bad the tube would be for Wednesday morning when we have to do it with our luggage for the train to Paris. No problems really, although getting through Paddington may prove a little interesting. We'll just leave early enough to make sure we have no problems.

We met up with the bus tour again (I love 24 hr tickets!) this time with batteries! Took most of the full tour again so I could get lots of photos. We did, however, get stuck in Monday morning London traffic. Not really any worse than what we see here, but we didn't get to the Tower of London until noon (we should have been there before 11 am). We didn't need the fast track part of the tickets (bought from the bus tour at a discount) as there was no line, but I'm not going to complain about that! We had a great time and spent hours there exploring and enjoying it. Took WAY too many photos, but that's why I brought lots of cards for the camera! And Brian thought I couldn't possibly go through a full 1GB card in a day. Hah! They had a phenomenal weapon and armour collection that proved a really neat challenge to photograph. Picked up a bunch of souvenirs, and a book on the crown jewels in Nanny's memory. It was nice, but a little bittersweet.

Also found out on the tour bus that Westminster was closed to the public until Wednesday as the Queen will be attending a ceremony there tomorrow. That had been our plan for the afternoon. :( Because we're leaving Wednesday morning, I guess we probably won't get to see it. :( We ended up spending pretty much the rest of the day at the Tower of London and didn't mind a bit. We found out at about 3 pm when we stopped for a VERY expensive snack that the pedometer wasn't working. We'd certainly walked more than 729 steps! All walking totals from here on are based on 2.25 miles/hr as an estimate.

We left the Tower (finally) at about 6:30pm. Decided we were both tired and just headed back to the hotel. We are *SO* not into late night stuff! Back to M&S (I love that we can cook for ourselves), made dinner, took another long bath (I said that tub would get lots of use), and into bed early.

Miles walked: 15