London - Amsterdam

Well, I am going to do this mostly in pictures because I don’t have enough time to spend writing heaps of words,

We are safely on the other side of the world – yay!

We got into London at around 4am so we had a full day of site seeing and we managed to fit in way more than we expected – mostly because London is such an easy city to get around. Firstly, we were just wandering around the streets and seeing the London-ness of everything around us. Then we decided to chuff off on the underground to Buckingham Palace in time for the Changing of the Guard (which of course they weren’t doing that day because they only do it every second day in winter – oh well).

So we wandered through the souvenir shop and on down through St James Park into Westminster where we found Downing St (which you aren’t allowed to go into),

Big Ben,

The Houses of Parliament,

Westminster Cathedral,

and finally the Thames and the closest we will be coming to the London Eye as Rob objects to the fact that it goes up into the air and away from his precious ground : )

Then we went off on the underground to the Tower of London. The tower is a medieval castle famous for being a prison and a place of torture. This is also where they house the royal jewels, but we weren’t allowed to take any photos of them so we bought some postcards of them instead.

Then it was time to head back to the hotel (where we had already stashed our luggage incase you were wondering) and meet up with our Contiki group. After filling out the paperwork we went out to buy some breakfast for the following day and then went straight to bed (as you can imagine we were pretty zonked after hardly sleeping on the plane and then having such a big day).

The next morning we packed our gear and met up at the coach at 7.15am and chuffed off to Dover (the white cliffs) and caught the ferry across the English Channel (the busiest shipping lane in the world) to France (yay – we made it into continental Europe). We drove out of France, into Belgium, out of Belgium, and into the Netherlands which is where we currently are – Amsterdam to be exact and we will be site seeing and looking around the city this morning.