It was a cold, breezy day when Chris and I, along with several members of our son’s and daughter-in-law’s wedding party, boarded one of those iconic open-air double-decker British busses for a tour of London. We had been sitting at a pub downtown London waiting for the best man to show up. Sam finally met us at the bus stop because he had overslept with jet lag. Henceforth, the tour began. There are so many sites to see in London. One of the most famous is Big Ben, Parliament’s clock tower, standing some 316 feet tall with 334 steps to the top. We wove our way in through old town London and the narrator told stories how London was originally founded by the Romans in 47 AD, the plague and the royalty.
There seems to be a lot of bridges over the river Thames. There is London Bridge (I found that it’s not really falling down), the Tower Bridge, the Westminster Bridge and the list goes on. Those are the three most famous, I believe. The London Bridge, which looks very old, was opened to traffic in 1973, replacing a 19th century stone-arched bridge, which replaced a 600-year-old stone bridge, which replaced a series of timber bridges that probably really did fall down. The song about London Bridge falling down is an ode to its numerous stints of ill repair. From the Tower Bridge, one can see the London Eye. That’s the “cantilevered observation wheel,”—I call it a Ferris wheel–that is featured in many movies, and strangely enough, the most popular paid tourist attraction in the UK, having over three million visitors a year. It sure was a lot bigger than the first Ferris Wheel ride Chris and I took together at the Randolph Fair in 1973.
The Tower of London is infamous for being a prison from 1100 until 1952. In total, it is a castle founded during the Norman Conquest with the tower built by William the Conqueror in 1078. The Tower of London is actually the name of the castle, which has served many purposes in its lengthy history—armory, treasury, mint, and home to the Crown Jewels. I was most concerned about slipping by the prison as a true American patriot. We also saw Westminster Abby and the 300 year-old St Paul’s Cathedral, which was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1963 and the dome remains one highest in the world. It was getting dark as we crossed Westminster Bridge and wove our way through the narrow streets toward Buckingham Palace.
In the distance you could once again see Big Ben and the British Parliament. There were no restrooms on the bus and after our extended pub stay, the landlord was forcing me to pay the rent on the Guinness. We kept thinking that when we got off the tour bus at Buckingham Palace there would be restrooms. Not so. By this time, I was dancing around and not sure that I could walk another ten feet. There are over a million closed circuit TV cameras in London—many of them on the Palace and its security fence. St James’s Park was across from the Palace. It was getting dark. And a country boy from America can survive and he does what he does. I’m praying those cameras were out of range! The rest of the evening was quite a relief (no pun intended).
