When the British captured Nazi Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess during World War II, Winston Churchill responded “Take him to the Tower” when asked where he should be imprisoned.

We headed off to visit the Tower of London and spent a couple of hours touring the grounds. Our tour guide was one of the Yeoman Warders, affectionately known as Beefeaters because they had beef rations while most other people didn’t. His name was Simon and he was quite a character!

Anyways, we toured the Tower of London, which is actually made up of thirteen towers, two walls, a number of buildings, including a church and bits of an old Roman wall.

There are also six ravens that, which the legends say if they fly away, the Tower and the monarchy will fall. Needless to say, the Yeomen Warders clip their wings and also have a “backup” raven. These are Big Black Birds. I sat on a bench that a couple of them were perched on and got a close-up look.

We also saw the royal jewels. The maces belonging to all the past monarchs along with other things, including crowns, were on display.

Besides people being executed, only a handful of which actually occured within the walls, the Tower of London is known for torture. Prisoners were occasionally tortured using any of a number of devices, including the rack.

From the Tower of London, we walked to the base of Tower Bridge where we found an alcove called Dead Man’s Hole. According to the sign, it was used to retrieve the “many corpses that were thrown in the river from the Tower and surrounding districts”. This happened so often that there was a mortuary built in the base of the bridge.

We then wandered a bit further and went to a Starbucks in St. Catherine’s Dock. From there, we headed home via the tube.

Click here to view pictures from Day 7.

The three of us caught the train at Wandsworth Common and headed to London Bridge station where we changed to another train heading into Cannon Street. Across the street from the Cannon Street station in the facade of the HSBC is a small glass case with a brass plaque. Ignored by almost everyone passing by, the London Stone a piece of a much larger stone that is possibly more than 3000 years old or may have been laid by the Romans or druids.

At one time, it may have marked the centre of London and it has been mentioned in the history of London on a number of occasions.

We next headed off to see what else was in the neighbourhood and came across St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The current St. Paul’s Cathedral was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the last 1600’s and is actually the third design he proposed. There were earlier chuches on the same location but they had this nasty habbit of getting hit by lightning, burning to the ground and so on.

The ceilings of the cathedral are amazing tile mosaics. Many surfaces are coated in gold. On the main floor, there are numerous memorials to many people and military units.

In the basement lies the crypt. It contains the remains of many people from British history and memorials to even more. Some people have simple stone markers while others, such as that of Admiral Lord Nelson, are grand carved stone monuments.

Wren is buried in the crypt and his marker is quite plain. The last sentence of the inscription reads Si monumentum requiris, circumspice which means If you seek his monument, look around.

One of the famous parts of St. Paul’s is the Whispering Gallery. It runs around the interior of the Dome 259 steps up from ground-level. It is so named because someone whispering on one side can be clearly head on the other. Unfortunately, the lineup to get up to its level was huge so we didn’t get up there.

From St. Paul’s we took a bus to Victoria station and returned home to get ready for Les Miserables. Yuki was able to arrange for tickets through her school. We met up with Christine, a friend of her’s, and headed downtown for dinner in Chinatown before the show.

This was the second time I’d seen it and it’s just as moving a story now as the first time I saw it. The sets were quite impressive and the actors were very good.

The four of us headed back to Wandsworth Common and Christine drove us home.

Click here to view pictures from Day 6.

We got a late start to the day, but c’est la vie.

We headed to Trafalgar Square and first visited St. Martin-in-the-Field church. It’s a small church and it’s very old.

Then, we headed across to the other side of Trafalgar Square to Canada House to partake in the Canada Day festivities at the High Commission. We arrived to find the place busy with people with oddly un-Canadian accents as well as with people with very Canadian accents. (Free beer and cake… go figure!)

After having a drink, some cake and listening to some music, we headed off to a mobile phone dealer to get the firmware in my new mobile phone upgraded. This took a couple of hours, so we headed off to see the London Eye. The ticket line at the London Eye was rather long, so we just looked up at it, snapped some photos and then headed back across Westminster Bridge.

By this time, the phone was ready so we swung by the phone dealer and then headed back towards Rob and Yuki’s. We stopped off at a local pub for dinner and a beer and then headed back home.

Click here to view the pictures from Day 5.

Monday morning started with Yuki going to school and Rob and I heading off to Greenwich to visit the Royal Observatory.

We travelled by tube, train and Docklands Light Rail to Greenwich. After walking a ways, we flagged down a cab and had it drive us up the rather large hill that the Observatory sits on.

In 1674, King Charles II appointed John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal. His task was to find a way to determine longitude using the stars. Calculating latitude using the sun and stars was relatively straightforward, but at the time, no one had figured out how to measure longitude.

The foundation stone was laid at 3:14pm on the 10th of August, 1675 and construction was completed by Christmas that year. Flamsteed and two servants moved into Flamsteed House on the 10th of July 1676.

Over the years, successive Astronomers Royal established their own “prime meridians” which ran through their telescopes. The line established by Airy was recognized as the Prime Meridian of the World in 1884. (Trivia fact: The British Ordnance Survey maps still use Bradley’s Meridian as Longitude 0, not the Prime Meridian.)

Anyways, we took the standard tourist photos of each of us straddling the Prime Meridian and then watched the other tourists doing the same thing. There was a machine with a highly accurate clock in it which would give you a certificate saying when you visited the Prime Meridian for a pound. Mine says I paid it a pound coin at 11:01:3805 on 30 June 2003.

We toured the various buildings, looked at an awful lot of highly accurate clocks and then headed outside just before 13:00. Every day since 1833, a ball on top of Flamsteed House has been raised halfway up the mast at 12:55, to the top at 12:58 and then it drops at exactly 13:00. This was started so that the ships in the harbour could set their chronometers.

We watched with bated breath as the ball rose first to half mast and then all the way to the top. Two minutes later it dropped and it was 1:00pm. After a few more pictures, we headed down the hill and had something to eat at the National Maritime Museum before heading down to the dock to catch a tourboat back downtown.

The tour was quite interesting, but the drizzle, which had been occuring on and off most of the day so far, was back. The Thames is quite a polluted river. On our trip upstream saw us pass all sorts of flotsam heading out to sea.

Upon arrival at the dock next to Embankment station, we headed via the Underground to Tooting Broadway to do some grovery shopping and then returned home.

Click here to view the pictures from Day 4.

On Sunday, Rob and I headed off on our own as we tired Yuki out with all the walking on Saturday. We headed downtown with what could be described as a vague plan at best.

Hopping on the train at Wandsworth Common, we headed to Victoria station and from there we caught a bus. Wandering down Whitehall, we visited the Royal Mews, home to the horses and carriages used by the Royal Family. Most impressive was the Gold State Coach, first used by George III in 1762. It weighs four tons and takes eight horses to pull it. Check my gallery for some pictures of it.

Of course, I bought some souvenirs at the gift shop at the Royal Mews.

From the Mews we looked in the gift shop of the Queen’s art gallery and then continued along Whitehall.

We passed in front of Buckingham Palace where we watched some of the red-coated guards doing their thing.

By this point it was lunch time so we headed over to the hotdog vendor behind Canada Gate and had hotdogs at the gates of Buckingham Palace.

Once we had consumed our lunch, we headed off to Trafalgar Square. There was a protest gathering of some sort around the base of Nelson’s Column, so we moved on to Covent Garden.

At Covent Garden we went to the Cafe in the Crypt underneath St Martin-in-the-Fields.

After some shopping in the gift shop, we proceeded on to the London Transport Museum, where we joined a tour being given to a couple of other visitors. We saw the various buses and trains on display from their collection, and even got to go inside some of the vehicles not normally open to the public. Very impressive! If you’re ever in London, take a couple of hours to visit the LTM.

From the LTM, we made our way back to Rob and Yuki’s, stopping to pick up chicken and chips from a local fish & chips takeaway.

Click here to view the pictures from Day 3.

Saturday morning started at 2pm. Except for Rob when the first postman arrived at 8:30am and the second one arrived at 9am.

We headed into downtown London via the train from Wandsworth Common to Victoria. From there, we headed to Hyde Park. Hyde Park is the largest park in London. Here is a link about it.

From Hyde Park, we walked around the Albert Memorial, across the street from Royal Albert Hall. We caught a bus which took us past the offices of the Royal Geographical Society.

From there we headed to Piccadilly Circus where we grabbed a bite to eat at that fine English eatery Pizza Hut.

We visited a store called The Gadget Shop where we played with a variety of toys, including an electronic roulette game that shocks the finger of one of the players. First person to flinch loses. Made me think of the game from Never Say Never Again.

From there we went to Westminster by tube and saw Big Ben, Whitehall, Downing Street and had a drink at a pub not too far from Trafalgar Square.

We returned home from there, taking a bus that gave us a splendid view of MI-5′s new headquarters building.

Click here for pictures from Day 2.

My day started at around four o’clock in the morning. That is not a civilized time for anyone to be going anywhere. My dad drove me to the airport for 0500 and I made my way through customs. We boarded and taxied to position for takeoff on Runway 25. We started rolling, however we didn’t take off. Instead we turned off at the first taxiway and came to a stop.

Hmm.

After about a minute, the captain came on the intercom and informed us that they hadn’t gotten the numbers for their weight & balance calculations. After a couple more minutes, we started to taxi again, took position and this time we started rolling down the runway at a speed much more suitable for taking off.

The flight to Washington/Dulles was relatively uneventful.

The flight from Washington to London took off on-time. The food was quite good. We were served breakfast and dinner. The view wasn’t the greatest as most of the time the world was covered by clouds. Nova Scotia was relatively cloud-free, though.

Out over the North Atlantic, more clouds, except for the occasional hole through which the cold dark waters could be seen. At one point, it looked like there were icebergs in the water.

We passed another airplane going in the other direction about 1000′ below us and 2 miles away from us. Before I could grab my camera, it was gone. Our closing speed must have been the better part of Mach 2.

A few hours later, we passed over the coast of Ireland and then headed towards the English Channel. It was starting to get darker the farther east we flew because we were flying into the terminator.

As we were approaching London, we were put into a holding pattern to the southeast of the airport. After about five minutes, we were cleared for landing. On the approach, I saw London Bridge and Parliament from the air.

Clearing customs took about half an hour, mostly because of the line. I collected my luggage and met up with Rob and Yuki. We took a mini-cab from Heathrow to their place.

Click here for pictures from Day 1.