Last Day Touring London

Sally split herself between East and West

This is the orange ball at the Royal Observatory, that drops every day at 1pm for the sailors to see from The Thames

This is a view towards London from the Royal Observatory......

This is the Tower Bridge which Ken has been calling the London Bridge all day. He had to admit that he was wrong and Sally was right much to his dismay!!!!!

Westminster Abbey

This is a picture of the finale of Coriolanis.......

The drums and the horns were played as the performance began....


This is a view of the Globe Theater form the inside. The ceiling was open as it was in the time of Shakespeare...

This a view of St. Paul's Cathedral from the Globe Theater....

Saturday, May 6
Excuse the typos and grammar; we are now paying to use the internet so we are rushing. Also, we are getting your emails, but can’t answer them all because we’re cheap. I don’t know if we will be able to blog after today, as we will head out of London tomorrow morning for our timeshare in the country. I don’t know what internet access will be like. We are enjoying your comments and emails as much as you say you are reading about our adventures. We think and talk about you all many times a day. Ken had a “proper” English breakfast this morning. For those of you don’t know what this is…eggs on a fried slice (bread fried in oil), chips (French fries), toast, grilled tomato, bacon, sausage and beans. I’m glad Ken brought his cholesterol pills. I have been having my usual egg and bacon or egg and cheese sandwich. The bread is VERY white. I haven’t seen bread that white since Mom was packing me bologna sandwiches every day in 3rd grade. We split a pasty today (that’s pronounced with a short a not a long a, right Jen?). Also split a flake 99 ice cream. The ice cream is the favorite!

One might ask why Ken was interested in going to see Shakespeare. Well, three years ago when we were in New York seeing the Lion King. Ken started up a conversation with a nice young lady from Australia. In the conversation the topic of Shakespeare came up. Ken said he liked Shakespeare...who knew!?!?! Well at that point, I knew that we would have to see a Shakespearean play when we visit London. Well, here we are………… Last night we went to The Globe Theatre to see Coriolanis. We had never head of it, but wanted to experience the Globe. The Globe is a replica of Shakespeare’s original theatre. It was amazing and one of our favorite things that we’ve done. There is a place were people stand the whole time right in front of the stage (not us). The actors actually go right into the audience! It is open air and you really felt like you stepped back in time. Okay, we did have a Starbucks in our hand from across the street, but other than that, we were right back there. It was 3 ½ hours and we loved it. After the play we all filed out, and everyone called cabs from the phones at the Globe. Of course Ken and I were left and getting a bit nervous. I think someone took our cab. We had to call 2 more times. We were afraid The Theatre would lock up and there we would be outside in the dark with nothing but American cell phones. Unlicensed cabs kept pulling up and were charging people insane amounts to take them. Then Safford, originally from the W Indies, pulled up in his taxi…”Baak?” he says, his leaning out. Ken told him we knew he wasn’t licensed, but he said he was and promised to get us where we wanted for the same price it cost us to get there. Safford was great. He gave us his opinions on 60’s British bands..Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, Stones etc and then told us about throwing up at Disneyland. It was a fun ride back to the hotel, but boy were we tired. It was about midnight, and in Bakken time, that is way past bedtime.

Today we know we are in London by the rain. It started out just cloudy, which is good because we took a cruise down the Thames River to Greenwich. We, of course, sat upstairs for the narrated tour. It was great view of the area. It took 55 minutes to get to Greenwich. Here is my story of Greenwich and then I will let Ken take over (he is uploading pics at the other computer). We got to Greenwich and it was a long walk through a cute town with a University and beautiful park. Through the park, and then up a VERY steep hill was the Royal Observatory…lots of clocks. I let Ken go off and explore on his own because he was really looking forward to this. I found a nice bench for most of it. It started raining for the walk back down the very steep hill and back to the boat. Okay, Paul, here’s Ken, just for you….Many of you might ask why I would be so interested in clocks. Well, my friend Paul with whom I taught for 25+ years and an avid sailor insisted that I read a book called Longitude. I never realized what a problem this was because we take it for granted. In fact we are using a GPS device to hopefully navigate us to our place tomorrow. In the 1700’s there was a race to solve this problem. A big prize of 20,00 pounds which was in excess of a million dollars to solve this problem. Many attempts were made; many of which failed. John Harrison spent almost his entire adult life trying to solve this. In fact, he spent nearly 19 years building one of his clocks called the H2. The reason the clocks were so important was because no one could find an accurate way to measure how far east or west the ships were from a give spot, which we now call the prime meridian. Anyway, Harris finally won the prize after 50-60years. His original clocks are displayed at the Royal observatory. The engineering is remarkable considering he did not have the technology that we have today to make the parts to assemble the clocks. Sorry I rambled, but it was really cool!!!!

Once again, people were great in helping us use the bus sytem and find our way around! Just amazing!