The Always Busy Couple: [Travel Tuesday] London Sightseeing

We have quite a bit to share regarding our previous trips therefore we will begin a Travel Tuesday segment to highlight past trips as well as new ones! Also it will be fun for us to go back through our photos and reminisce about our trips. For February, we will focus on our trip to the UK back in May 2011.

Overall we LOVE the city of London. I think this is where we really started to develop an appreciation for history and have ensured we spend some time during our travels learning some aspect of the local history. We would welcome the opportunity to go back to London someday.

Outside the Tower of London with Tower Bridge in the background

Hotel
The Waldorf Hilton - We used Hilton Points here and it was fantastic! Great location within walking distance to several areas. If you are an Honors member, they have a fantastic lounge for breakfast and tea time. Instead of lunch, we would come back here to enjoy the snacks at tea time to save money.

Sightseeing
Buckingham Palace
Tower Bridge
London Eye
St. Paul's Cathedral
Tower of London
Westminister Abbey
Royal Mews
The Monument
Abbey Road

Helpful Tips

Bring comfortable shoes, we did ALOT of walking
Avoid the cabs as much as possible, they are expensive!
If you are a Bank of America customer, they have a partnership with Barclays therefore taking Pounds out of the ATM was very cost effective
Buy a pop-up-map when you get there. It's small and easy to navigate through the city. It was a lifesaver for us!
Make sure to walk around at night, it looks like a different city!

Buckingham Palace - Certainly a "must see" when in London. Since we were there just a month after the Royal Wedding, I had to see where the Duke & Duchess exchanged their first kiss! Unfortunately there were no tours of the inside. I think the only available time to do this is in July/August while the queen is away. If this is important to you, I would recommend going during that time. We only stayed about 15 minutes as you are just looking through a big fence at the building, not too much action. I love taking photos of flags while in a country and opposite of the Palace was a great spot to do so!

View of Buckingham Palace

View opposite Buckingham Palace

Tower Bridge - In our opinion, skip it. We did not think the time and money was worth it for the Tower Bridge entry. You go up the elevators and can walk across the blue tunnel connecting the two towers. The windows were quite dirty to look through and we had seen much better views from above at The Monument and London Eye

Tower Bridge

The Tower of London - This was hands down one of my favorite sites in London. Hello, the CROWN JEWELS are housed here! One of the best tips we had read while preparing for our trip was to get to the Tower for opening and head straight to the jewels. I have to tell you, it was the best advice we had all trip. The entrance can be seen below and is located towards the back of the property so you feel like you are missing a bunch of stuff as you make your way there. Once inside, you walk through long loops as though you are waiting at an amusement park. Luckily for us, there was nobody there! As you make your way through the rooms, there are some parts that are on moving conveyors to ensure people go through efficiently. Again, lucky for us since there were not many other people, we were able to go back through a second time without a wait. When we walked past later that afternoon, the line of people was out the door to see the jewels. I would guess they had a good 1.5 hours to wait. There are no photos allowed inside however suffice to say I was drooling at the sites! ;)

Entrance to the Crown Jewels

Although the Tower of London was used during a dark and gruesome time in England's history, I found it fascinating to go through the dungeons and see how terrible some of the Kings treated their people. It was truly a highlight for me!

Tower of London

The Monument - This was one of my favorite spots for a bird's eye view of the city, much better than the Tower Bridge. It is not for the faint of heart, you climb 311 windy, steep steps to get to the top.

The staircase......311 steps to be exact

View from the top

It's worth the hike!

St. Paul's Cathedral - This was my favorite church that we visited during our stay in London. One of the other benefits from walking everywhere is that you can make pit stops along the way. While St. Paul's wasn't on our "must see" list, we walked past and decided to go inside. It was GORGEOUS on the inside. I found it to be the most elaborately decorated cathedral in London. I would recommend finding a reason to walk by during your time in the city. Unfortunately, no pictures inside.

St. Paul's Cathedral

Outside St. Paul's Cathedral

The Royal Mews - This is a quick tour, which we really enjoyed. It was fun to see all of the carriages in the collection and as a bonus we even got to see them take out a carriage complete with horses and costume!

The Royal Mews

Westminster Abbey - Again having just witnessed the Royal Wedding, I had to visit Westminster. The outside was much more appealing than the inside. The architecture was amazing yet after seeing St. Paul's, I had to wonder why Kate didn't chose to be married there!

Westminster Abbey

Can you imagine what it would cost to have this on a building today?

The London Eye - I know it's touristy however I had to try it once. I wish we would have purchased our tickets online prior to going as the line was VERY long to get a ticket and there was a separate LONGER line to actually get on. The best part was a bird's eye view of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.