European Adventure: London

Mid-way through June, Chase and I dropped Livia and Jane off at my parent's home in Southern California and hopped a plane to London.

London makes my heart happy. 

We actually only had an 8 hour layover in London before our flight to Rome (which was our real destination), but I wanted so badly to show Chase a little of my favorite city, so we dashed out for a quick look around town.

Our first stop was supposed to be a quick walk past Buckingham Palace. Imagine our surprise when we popped out of the tube and found this crowd waiting for us. The television crews were what really tipped us off that something was going on, so we hung around awhile and, surprise! Queen Elizabeth was driven right past us in her car. Apparently we were lucky enough to arrive on her birthday, just as the celebration was beginning. Seriously, what are the chances?

I was feeling pretty good about the fact that we saw her drive by, and since we were so incredibly far away from the palace and couldn't see anything, we decided to move on with our brief tour.

As we tried to weave our way through the crowd, suddenly the main road opened up and we found ourselves marching down it, towards the palace. At this point, we were still just hoping to find a way to exit the mad throng, but I was glad Chase got to get a little closer to the palace, and snapped a picture of him. Just as I was taking the picture, I heard the lady behind me tell her child to hurry and run to the gate to get a good view. What? Something was going to happen right now? Still clueless, we decided to hurry and get a front row seat, just in case.

A few minutes later...oh, hello there, Royal Family!

So that was fun. And then they did a whole bunch of military flyovers (do you see how close those planes are to each other?) and the band played, and it felt very grand and English.

We didn't have too much time after all that, but we wound our way towards Parliament and Westminster Abbey, and were caught in a sudden downpour. We hadn't brought umbrellas on this trip. Even at this point I thought this would be our only rainstorm, so we didn't bother buying one. Ha!

 We spent our remaining hour in the National Gallery and hurried back to Heathrow. We didn't see most of the things in my carefully planned out route around London, but I found I didn't mind too much. I don't think I could have worked out that experience at Buckingham Palace better if I'd tried!