Power touring... or beating the jet lag beast

We made it to London without any difficulties or drama. As I sit here are write this, both J. and D. are sleeping and I am going on 32+ hours without any sleep. We are all pretty exhausted.

This morning our flight arrived on time at 6:40 am. Being the intrepid (and cheap) travelers that we are, we decided to forgo the expensive, fast train into the city from the airport and decided to take the underground. No problems there, except we were on the train right in the middle of rush hour on a Monday morning and it was a bit of a crush. We were able to check into our hotel right away which was nice because we could dump our bags, and get on with one of our two days in London.

First a comment about our hotel. It seems clean. We have beds and a bathroom. It's in a pretty decent location. And it was less than a hundred dollars US a night. This would be a deal anywhere, much less London. Well, we are hardly living in the lap of luxury, but as I said, we have beds, which at this point in the traveling game, is all that is truly necessary. Oh, and it has free wifi, so there's that, too.

With only two days to see London we knew that we would have to power through the fatigue and get out and do something. That something turned out to be walking ~7 miles. I have blisters on my feet, and was pretty much hobbling by the end. Don't worry, I travel with moleskin, and have fixed them up. I should be okay tomorrow. Plus, we've now figured out the bright red double-decker buses and will be making good use of those tomorrow.

Poor Duncan really, really wanted to go crawl into bed, but we pointed out that he will be much happier if we spent the day outside and reset his internal clock today. He was a trooper despite being exhausted.

We saw St. George and the Dragon... on accident because we turned the wrong way to start our walk at first.

While we were resting by Wellington's arch, the horse guard rode by from the changing of the guard.

We walked around Buckingham Palace along with thousands of other people. The queen was in residence, but we didn't see her.

Wandered through Hyde Park to see Westminster Abbey.

Didn't see Big Ben. (It's under renovation.)

Did see the tops of the Houses of Parliament...

and the horse guard parade grounds.

Then what do you do after walking all of that? Decide to go wander around the British Museum, of course. We passed by Nelson's column on our way.

Passed through Covent Gardens and the theater district before we finally reached the British Museum.

The Rosetta Stone,

Assyrian statues

Assyrian statues, 

and this cool library were some of the things we saw.

By this time we were all dragging. We walked to a pub we had seen earlier, had either fish and chips or pot pies, and enjoyed sitting down. Some of us might have started to doze a bit. A quick bus ride back to the hotel, and after a good night's sleep we'll be ready for another day.