Adventures in London: Beautiful Greenwich

Me and Mom on the boat

I have my laptop again! Thanks to my spectacularly wonderful aunt Wendy I had a new laptop charger ready and waiting for me when I got home. So, now I can catch up on my blog posts. :)

So I’ll start with my last Sunday in London. Mom and I went on a boat ride down the Thames. And the weather was perfect! Sunny, but not too hot. It was great. It was cool to see all of my favorite places from the river. We rode the boat to Greenwich, so there were several places that we went past that I hadn’t seen before. It was a lot of fun.

The time ball at Greenwich

I absolutely loved Greenwich! It was so beautiful. Once off the boat we headed up to the Royal Observatory (where the Primer Meridian line/Greenwich Mean Time is). We had to walk through a huge park (which are very common in London), but it was a relatively steep climb. We got to the Observatory just before 1, which is when they drop the time ball (a crudely made red ball) to mark 1 PM exactly. So, we watched it drop. It wasn’t very dramatic. I called the time ball the Cherry, but Mom preferred a more lengthy title: a papier-mâché project gone wrong. :) After that we wandered through some of the museum there. One had steampunk art and one was a space museum. We also looked through their Camera Obscura (it was a room with a hole at the top and with some nifty mirror work, a dark room, and a big white table we were able to see the Queen’s House (a building at the bottom of the hill) through it.

After all the time at the museums we headed back town into the town and grabbed some ham and cheese paninis from this little bread shop. Then we walked around the college there. I loved it! It was gorgeous! The architecture was great. It was a very photogenic college. :) They had a room called the Painted Hall and the whole thing was covered in these gorgeous paintings. Floor to ceiling.

Found this rock. Named it the 'Alien rock'

We walked down the banks of the Thames for a bit and collected rocks and shells. The rocks were so smooth because the Thames is a tidal river so the rocks were constantly being tossed and tumbled in the river so they become ridiculously smooth.

We walked back up through the college to the Queen’s House (the building we had seen through the Camera Obscura). It had a lot of artwork in it. It was some very depressing art though. It was done as a memorial to various wars, but all of the sculptures were depressing. So, we walked through it pretty quickly.

As we headed back to the pier to catch our return boat to London we got ice cream (chocolate and toffee for me and toffee and strawberry for Mom). Our tour guide on the way back was hysterical! It was the end of the day for him so he was very sarcastic. He was constantly saying things like, “I would explain this in more detail, but it’s the end of the day and I just don’t care anymore.” It wasn’t meant to be mean and it was hilarious. It was pretty great.

We got dinner after the boat ride at Byron’s. It’s a burger place (I’ve eaten there before). We got these bacon cheeseburgers that were pretty fantastic. And after that we just headed back to the hotel. It was a pretty exciting day.

Enjoy the pictures!