Academily: A birthday spent in London

After a spectacular first day in London, I was excited to see what the second day had in store for us. Consequently, it was also my birthday! We had scheduled a hop-on hop-off bus tour, a visit to the London Eye, and a boat tour before we ever left the states, and I'm so glad we did-it was all worth it and so much fun!

I love being on bus tours because you learn things you easily would have walked right by and never known about. We saw where part of Edward Scissorhands was filmed, the building they used for part of the filming of Gringotts' vaults in the Harry Potter films, saw where Margaret Thatcher lives, and received many other little tidbits of information along the way.

First stop- the Westminster Abbey. Once again, no pictures allowed inside, but it was really cool (especially in our day and time when so many events have happened there in our lifetime-Will and Kate's Royal wedding anyone?). We saw the high altar, hundreds of tombs and memorials (including famous queens and kings, poets, writers, actors, soldiers, and even one for Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton), were a part of two prayer services, and each lit a prayer candle. All in all, it was beautiful, sometimes a little creepy, and we spent 3 hours exploring.

Next stop-the London Eye. Seriously, if you come to London, book the Flexi-fast pass in advance. This lets you skip a whole lot of the very long lines, and you don't want to miss this attraction that gives you 30 minutes of incredible views of the city.

Old meets new - the London Eye encircles Big Ben.

Parliament, Victoria Tower, and Big Ben from the top of the Eye.

See that sand court? That will be the site of beach volleyball for the Olympic games later this summer!

Next stop was St. Paul's Cathedral. Of course, we had to come see it because this is where Diana and Charles were married. We got lucky with our timing; like so many of the attractions, usually it costs to go inside the church. However, we got there just in time for the evening prayer, so they open it up to the public for that 45 minutes. I'm so glad we went inside because it was so beautiful. In fact, I may like it better than the Abbey's inside, but again, no pictures allowed. But like the Abbey and Notre Dame, we lit a prayer candle.

Lastly, we headed for our boat tour. Lucky again (or maybe all those prayer candles), we caught the last one. On the way, we saw the Tower of London from the outside.

And went over the Tower Bridge.

The bridge has a very special addition right now. It made for my favorite picture of the day. How cool is this? And as a side note, we could not have asked for more spectacular weather. Do you see that beautiful sky? I've never had a birthday below 85 degrees, and it topped out around 70 this day.