Euro Day 20 - Look Kids... Big Ben...Parliament

Although European Vacation is a very distant third behind the original Vacation and Christmas Vacation (ahead of that abomination Vegas Vacation) it does have the classic scene of Clark getting stuck in a roundabout telling the kids to look at Big Ben and Parliament.

Fortunately I am not driving and we are leveraging London's excellent public transportation system to get around.   We are just steps from the station that Harry Potter made famous, King's Cross.  You can see it at the end of the street in this photo that I took just outside our apartment. You will also noticed that yesterday's rain had cleared out and it was a glorious day.

Before we got the kids moving Karen and I got coffee and walked through the enormous Regents park.  They have a display of modern art throughout the park that proves that I don't get modern art.  For supposedly creative people - they have the most boring names for their art.  Many of them are "Untitled" or the one below is "Red Wheelbarrow".  I would have gone with something like "Eternal Struggle".

We got the kids mobile and headed down to the station for some sightseeing.   We first walked through Hyde Park and the Princess Diana fountain.  One thing that struck us immediately was the love affair  that many people have with all manner of diseased creatures of flights.  People were letting pigeons land on them and getting up close and personal with geese.   Hyde Park and many other places in London are in desperate need of a little circle of life action via a few hawks or falcons cleaning up the joint.

We walked around Buckingham Palace.  We missed the changing of the guard a bit earlier - so not much to see other than the guards occasionally moving back and forth.

We then headed over to the Imperial War Museum which was absent from Karen's list of things to see but Jake and I wanted to check it out.  Turned out to have some very interesting things - especially on WW1.

We then walked over to the Southbank area to check out the scene.  Unfortunately the London Eye was sold out for the day and we had also missed the Thames river cruise - so we put those on the list for the next day.  We then stopped over at Westminster Abbey but it was past their closing time as well.

We hit a local pub for a late dinner and had a lively political debate to end a long day in the city.