First Stop....London!

Chad and I recently returned from a once in a lifetime 2-week adventure through Europe! It was an amazing experience and we are so grateful for all we got to do and see. We went with a tour group for 18-35 year olds, and had an awesome tour manager! Our first 2 days, before we met our group, we were on our own to explore London. The first day we hopped on one of the city bus tours, which took us around to all the major sights and allowed us to get on and off as desired. The 2nd day, we took the Underground and explored on our own.

Chad with Big Ben
Changing of the guard in front of Buckingham Palace
There were so many people, it was hard to get a good view of the Palace.

This bridge is called Tower Bridge, and is often mistaken for the London Bridge (as in, "London Bridge is falling down..."). We saw the London Bridge as well, which actually wasn't very impressive.
This is the Tower of London, famous for keeping prisoners back in the day and torturing them. Lovely, huh? We took a tour of it and it's pretty incredible to see.
The changing of the guard inside the Tower of London. I (Sondra) just about got trampled by them because I was [unknowingly] in their way when they started marching!

They had something called Speaker's Corner in one of their parks. It's where anyone can get up on their soap boxes (literally) and say whatever they want about anything - religion, politics, whatever. They only rule is they cannot say anything bad about the Queen. People were lined up for at least a half a mile on their soap boxes speaking whether people were listening or not.

The above 2 pictures are at Trafalgar Square. We also went into a museum by the Square that had lots of cool stuff. If you're into impressionist art, we saw the original Sunflowers by Van Gough and several Waterlilies by Monet.