Sunday, November 16, 2014

Europe Trip: May 3 to May 9 Part 2

I was very excited to see some things in London like Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, and St. Paul's cathedral. It was fun to see those things, but honestly, they looked just like I'd expect them to look. Like every picture of them you've ever seen: In movies, on TV, on Google. I'm still glad we went to see them. But the time spent navigating around London with Dave and Joshua was just as much fun. I took pictures of a ton of buildings and scenery, but who likes to look through other peoples' pictures of buildings in Europe? That's what Google Images is for.
First off, it doesn't rain often in Utah. When it does rain, we tend to just stay indoors. It rains in London, and did on one of our days walking around. Joshua had a blast playing with the umbrella. Here are a few shots of our rainy day:
 By the Tower and Tower Bridge
 Walking to/across the Tower Bridge
 Wait, what? that's just a building. That's St. Paul's cathedral.
 No, look again. See the teeny red dot? That's Joshua! St. Paul's Cathedral is HUGE!
 OK, OK, here's a building shot, but we actually traipsed up the hundreds of stairs in a tiny, claustrophobic spiral staircase up to the balcony place. (Even though it said pregnant women shouldn't do it.)
We saw the "Saints and Apostles look down as she sells her wares." They were smiling.
See!? Huge.
Unfortunately there were no birds to be fed. That happened later in St. James's Park.

Remember how we packed a bunch of food for our roadtrip to LA and then for our flight over because we thought we wouldn't be getting any Airline food? Well, some of that was PB sandwiches. They were pretty gross by the time we got to London. So we fed some birds in St. James's Park. Those ducks, etc. (so many cool birds!) were not shy. These mallards came right up to Joshua and would snatch the sandwich pieces right out of his fingers. I think they even got his fingers once or twice.


 Then the pigeons came and swarmed us. Such gross birds.
 We sat to rest our feet for a bit while Joshua fed some more birds. These mallards sure were persistent. They knew what was up. "Gimme that food!"
In this park I kept thinking of old videos we'd watch of when my parents went to London when we were little. There were a bunch of swans at a park (not sure if it was this one), and they'd all waddled into the water, and as they'd get in, they'd wiggle their tails a bunch of times. Was it St. James's Park?
Feeding the birds was fun for Joshua. We tried to do a lot of things that were fun for him, that would be enjoyable for us as well.
We all had a lot of fun in Kensington Gardens.
 Joshua noticed that we would do this a lot to maps, so he started showing us where the map went, too.
 We stopped by to see the Peter Pan statue.
 I tried to capture the angle that they get in the end of Hook, but it wasn't quite the right time of day. I'm really glad that we did go see this statue as Robin Williams passed away later this year.
 Just open space to run was all Joshua really needs. We ended up getting a little bit lost in this one. It's SO BIG! How do people live without giant landmarks like mountains.
 We went to the Diana Memorial playground, and had to wait for about half an hour to get in. They just monitor how many people are in there at once so it's not completely swamped. We thought it was pretty cool, but then we knew it was awesome once we turned the corner and saw this beauty:
 A giant pirate ship!
 Joshua had so much fun climbing around on it...
 and in it...
 and watching other kids do things he couldn't quite do yet.
He waited for his turn at the steering, then I'm pretty sure he ran us into a few other boats, maybe some cars.
Here's a random one: Someone had left their dog outside of the park, tied to the fence. That dog was bound and determined to get free. He was gnawing and gnawing at that leather strap on the leash.
Wow, there is still so much to write about. This might be a 3 or 4 part series. I'll end it with another picture from John & Christin's house in the evening. After a long day of exploring London, we let Joshua veg-out and watch a movie (Planes? Frozen?) on the tablet.

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