Where We Do A LOT of Walking And Manage To Not Get Caught In The Tower
When we talked to Guest Services on Wednesday afternoon, we discovered that our Tower of London tour for Thursday was rescheduled from 2:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. This meant we could no longer do our “Word of Shakespeare” excursion scheduled for the morning. The silver lining: we had a little time in the morning instead another crack-o-dawn breakfast.
But we did need to have an early-ish lunch to grab the tender by 12:20 to make sure we were at the pier by the official meeting time (12:50). This was not a problem – the tender ride was around the “corner”, no more than 5 minutes.
The Tower tour was one of those that I was a little concerned about. My memories of the last time I was there was eleventy billion steps (, most of them in a tight spiral staircase. I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle the situation – where I was going to stop and wait for the group to come back and get me.
Our tour guide was Dominic from the Thames cruise the night before, which was great, because he was great.
On the way to the Tower, we drove across the Tower Bridge:
The Tower itself is a complex of assorted buildings, all of them hundreds of years old.
The had been a zoo at some point in the Tower’s history. Scattered around the grounds were animal sculptures.
Because the queue for the Crown Jewels was super short and moving quickly, we did the Crown Jewels first. Of course, no photos are allowed in the exhibit.
Take my word for it, the exhibit was spectacular. We bought a book with photos. Take a look at this link for more info:
https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/the-crown-jewels/#gs.4w7uri
After the Crown Jewels, Dominic brought us to Anne Boleyn’s execution spot and told us the gruesome story of her execution.
And then we had free time to walk around the site and do whatever we wanted – walk up the steps of the Tower, or not. Therefore, the steps were a non-issue. Andy went up the Tower.
At the assigned meeting time, we walked back to the bus. We had a nice view of the Tower Bridge.
Traffic on the way back to the ship was horrific. We arrived about 15 minutes after the official “all aboard” time. We knew the ship wouldn’t leave without us, but it was a bit of a scurry onto the tender and then back onto the ship. The “scenic sailing” away from London was delayed by about 30 minutes or so.
We stayed in our stateroom to watch the sail-away from our veranda.
We saw the London “barriers” – the system to control the river and prevent flooding the city.
Then dinner, and we called it A Day.
Tomorrow: Leeds Castle and Canterbury Cathedral
Maryland Meshugas 