We liked the Tower of London. We went in by train to Paddington and then took the Circle Line to Tower Hill. In Oxford, Dad parked while the rest of the family bought tickets. He took quite a while to find the way to the parking lot across from the station, and then it took 15 pounds only in coins for the Saturday parking (20 pounds peak time!). It’s only 4.50 if you have a cellphone, but we didn’t. A cab to the station would have been cheaper. Anyway, Dad rushed to get change from Mother, then rushed back, had to go to a second machine since the first was broken, but we did make our train on time.
At the Tower, we followed the Beefeater on his short outside tour and then went in to the Jewel Room. It had a moving beltway past the main crown jewels, which worked well to keep people moving (and you could go back to see the other side of the exhibit). The children liked Queen Victoria’s little 1870 diamond crown. Dad liked the Cullinan diamond in the sceptre.
Faith was royally freaked out by the guards who wore the huge bearskin hats that practically cover the eyes, carry rifles or something scary looking, and walk like robots making harsh noises with their shiny boots and yells.
We also spent a lot of time in the White Tower, the old keep in the center of the Tower where the armoury is. You can see it behind Lilli in the cannon picture.
We then took a bus to Trafalgar Square, thinking we might go to Kensington to the Natural History Museum or a big playground there, but we were too tired. We stopped and ate hot roasted chestnuts, which Amelia loved. Then we went to the National Gallery for half an hour, mainly looking at the Gainsboroughs and suchlike.
So we went to Chinatown instead, to the Wong Kei Restaurant, a large and well-known but not fancy one that Mother went to in her student days. It’s not quite as good as it used to be, alas– regular cabbage instead of Chinese cabbage now, for example. But we enjoyed it.
Our trip home was pleasantly uneventful. The chilren behaved wonderfully all day, in fact, tired though they became.
It’s so generous and thoughtful of you to bother to take a camera along on all these forays. And there’s the nice bonus of how much fun these photos will be to look at in 20 years – the Tower and accoutrements will be the only unchanged detail.