The Keenans: Days 3 and 4

Well, there is not much to show for day three. We went to St. Paul's Cathedral first. It is absolutely beautiful, but yet again... no pictures allowed inside. So here is a picture of the outside. You are able to climb up to the Whispering Gallery, Stone Gallery, etc. We only made it to the Stone Gallery. To get to the Whispering Gallery, you must climb over a hundred stairs. Some of these stairs are very steep and very narrow (only one person can fit in the staircase at a time... no passing). When we got to these steep stairs, I started to feel a bit paniced. I started thinking about what would happen if there was a fire. We would all die. There was no way to escape, I'm sure that we would have been trampled first, but still... it's a terrible way to go! Once we got up there I was fine. You could look down on the cathedral and see all of the amazing artwork from a different point of view. This gallery is a round balcony inside the cathedral. In the Whispering Gallery you can sit in two places far away and whisper something around the circle and the person sitting nearest can hear as if you are talking plainly. It was really pretty cool when we figured out how to do it. Scotty talked me into going up to the Stone Gallery. When you get there, you have walked up 376 stairs!! Really steep, scary stairs! This gallery was on the outside of the building so you could see so much of London. It was really beautiful!

I had been curious about London and all of its monuments to countries helping in World War II and had wondered why the U.S. was never mentioned despite the help that was lent from us. When we got to the back of St. Paul's, behind the high altar, I saw it. There they have a wonderful memorial to all of the soldiers who lost their lives fighting in Europe. They actually have a book of names of the soldiers, their rank, division, etc. The chapel/memorial was amazing.

After St. Paul's we were hungry and had promised ourselves American food. We set off for Hard Rock Cafe- London. It was exciting getting to order chicken and french fries! Sadly, we were so excited that we forgot to take a picture!! So it goes!

Onto day four. This day was by far my favorite. We started by taking the Underground to a boyscout museum for Scotty. It was the Lord Baden-Powell building. It is actually a multi-purpose building. It serves as a youth hostel, meeting room, and has a small boyscout history section.

From there we went to the Natural History Museum. This was wonderful. Just the building itself was amazing. On the outside and inside, there are animals, fossils, flowers, etc. carved into the stone. The best thing about it is that it is free. We liked that.

The first exhibit that we went to was the dinosaurs. Little did I know, Scotty used to love dinosaurs when he was little, so this was a real thrill for him. I have to admit that it was quite interesting. I liked the animated T Rex best. Here he is... isn't he ferocious?

We saw exhibits on mammals, sea creatures, primates, the earth, etc. I took a picture of this skeleton for Mom... it's the waterhorse!! In this glass case are hundreds of hummingbirds. I know that it is not the best picture, but you can get the idea. It was incredible and strange to look at at the same time.

After the Natural History Museum we got on Underground and headed to Covent Garden, not really knowing what it was. When we got there, we were thrilled. If you've never been, it is kind of like a somewhat clean version of New Orleans. There are street performers everywhere an outdoor market set up as well. We loved it. There was so much to see and do. We actually bought some wooden carved tulips for our house and I bought two handpainted bowls that I loved. We were so excited that we didn't want to leave. Sorry, but the only thing that I took a picture of was this crazy passageway between these two buildings. I thought it was interesting.

From there, we took the Underground to the Embankment. This runs along the Thames. I finally got the Starbucks that I had been wanting the whole time and a nice lady asked if we wanted our picture taken. Don't we look happy?

From there we walked a while to see the sights that we wanted to see again. We came across this building... White Hall. It was enormous and we had seen it from the London Eye but never knew what it was. It had beautiful gardens in front and we took a few pictures. My kind of crazy, weird pictures.