“Look kids, Big Ben, Parliament”

After being in Edinburgh for ten days, we took the kiddos to London. I wanted to take the kids to London of course, and I was considering driving there. I also wanted to take them on some train journeys, and then East Coast Trains offered a ridiculous deal: £9 each way. Seriously, I couldn’t drive to London for this price, so for £108 we had six table-reserved seats on the 5 hour train to London. I think the kids loved the train travel.



In London we did most of the obligatory tourist stuff, save the museums. You see, four kids don’t all agree simultaneously on when you should go inside a museum. We also didn’t go inside anything else, because in London they charge you for everything. Seriously, we went to St. Paul’s Cathedral only to see that it would cost us roughly $50 to take the family into the church. A CHURCH! I went in as far as I could. It was nice, but it was no $50 church. I’ll take der Dom for free, or Notre Dame, or St. Peter’s, or, well, any church not in London. Okay, I got sidetracked. Point is, we really saw everything from the outside due to the need to pay our mortgage.

We took the train on Saturday and found our hotel. It was interesting with incredibly uncomfortable beds but worked. Sunday, we took the tube (not handicap or stroller compliant in 2010) to St. James Park and scampered to the changing of the horse guards. Then, we walked back through the park to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Aside from the baby nearly choking to death (for real, people around us were very scared) the kids waited like champions for the festivities to begin.



I didn’t see too much of it, but the kids saw short bits when I would hold them up over the crowd. Okay, two guard changes, then we went back into the park to the playground. We had a picnic. We saw a pigeon rescued from the algae on the pond. We returned to the horse guards to catch a photo with a guard.



I wanted to go to 10 Downing Place so we headed that way. When I saw the radical Islamist protest, I thought that might be a fun experience for the kids. Then I saw police pulling some of them down and things getting thrown back and forth across the street so we turned around and headed for Trafalgar Square. No kidding, vans filled with riot police went by for about twenty minutes.

Later that day we took a boat on the Thames. It was fun and a good way to see a lot of the city in a fashion the kids found to be entertaining.



The next day, we asked the girls what they wanted to do. Without hesitation, “Ride a double decker bus and an 18 meter bus.” We were able to work that into the plan with the double decker taking us to St. Paul’s Cathedral (where one girl had a 40 minute nose bleed) and catching an 18 m bus (one of the extended flexible mid-section buses) when the boys were in bed. So that day we did the outside of Tower Bridge, Tower of London, St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Parliament, the Eye, and Kensington Gardens. We spent the longest time at the Diana Princess of Wales Playground, the most amazing playground we have ever been to.

The baby spent most of the trip in the backpack which has carried all four kids to many interesting places. He didn’t complain too much, but he was probably still reeling from the pain of getting a granola bar ripped out of his throat by parents’ hoping to save to his life.



Oh yeah, he also had a low grade fever the entire trip. Sadly, this made him lethargic and easier to have along.

The train back was at first horrible. The car we had reserved seats in was about 100°F. Then, they announced that the AC was broken in the car and we should move to a different car. This gave us a trip home in First class as you can see on the seat back (if you are able to see past the hair).