Megan and I woke up and got ready for our 3rd day exploring London. We ate a delicious breakfast (pastries, fruit, porridge, juice and coffee) at our hotel (Hub by Premier Inn, near St. James Park) and set out to explore.
We walked to Big Ben and took some obligatory pictures, then crossed the bridge towards the London Eye. When asking around for advice about our trip pretty much everyone we talked to said "Don't bother doing the London Eye. It's boring, expensive, has long lines, and is not worth it." We decided to ignore everyone's advice and do it anyway. It was definitely overpriced at about 25 pounds each person, but I think if we hadn't done it "eye" would regret it my whole life. The lines to get tickets and then get on were pretty short. We only waited for about 30 minutes total. The ride was fun and had great views of the whole city for miles and miles. We took about a billion pictures and made a million "eye" jokes, such as "Eye love this view" and "Eye am so glad we did this" and "Who helped Grandma set up the Christmas village?" "eye!". (maybe not the last one...inside joke, you had to be there :-)
After Megan and "eye" got off the London Eye we walked towards The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. We stopped at a cute restaurant for a bowl of soup and more coffee. Our Europe trip will always be remembered as "that one time we ate a lot of soup". We got to the gallery (no entrance fee, yay!) and began viewing hundreds of beautiful works of art. There were so many classic works of art that I remember studying in school from artists that we all know and love such as Monet, Picasso, van Gogh, da Vinci, Raphael, and more. There was also tons of pictures depicting breastfeeding and I took a picture of every single one since I'm a big breastfeeding advocate and I loved seeing it depicted in so many beautiful paintings. It was so awesome to see so many of those masterpieces in person. When planning our trip we weren't even planning on going to the National Gallery but we saw it the day before on our bus ride and decided to check it out. I'm so glad we did! We spent about 2 hours there, but a person could really spend an entire day or more there.
After awhile we were walking from room to room saying "more beautiful art... Picasso, cool whatever... Monet, wow great..." There's only so many iconic paintings a person can take in in a day. We decompressed in Trafalgar Square and took pictures with some giant lions before heading to our next destination: The Natural History Museum. After a couple walks, a bus ride, and a wait in line we were in! We were greeted by lifesize replicas of blue whales, elephants, and tyrannosaurus rexes. The place was huge and once again there was so much to see. They had detailed animal exhibits as well as a detailed exhibit about the human life-cycle. This was another place where one could spend an entire day or more, but we were beginning to feel a little museumed-out. I walked through and looked at as much as I could but we were ready for a drink and/or nap.
We were only a short tube ride from the iconic Hard Rock Cafe so we made our way there to get a drink and a souvenir hurricane glass. We walked through Hyde Park and saw the Wellington Arch. We decided to walk back to our hotel through Green Park and stopped at Buckingham Palace (or Bucky as we fondly called it now) and took some more pictures. Once we were back at our hotel we were tired from a long day, but decided to power through and keep having fun as it was our last night in London. We had a happy hour drink and snack in our hotel lounge and decided to take an Uber to a bar a few miles away that looked cool. We wanted to see what it was like riding in a car where the driver was on the opposite side that we're used to. It was crazy and new for about a minute and then it was like 'cool, we're just riding in a car in crazy London traffic'. It would have been faster to get to our destination taking the tube, and possibly even walking, but we waited patiently and eventually got to the bar. The place was a really fancy nightclub but as it was only 7pm it was pretty dead. When we walked in and the hostess looked us up and down in our jeans and T-shirts and looked disgusted. The few other people there were wearing business suits and dresses. We had one drink and left to find another place more our style. We found a casino where I quickly lost $20 playing "War" against a card dealer in 4 fast hands. The night was shaping out to be kind of a dud and we were a little bummed that we hadn't had any real conversations with any Londoners. We walked back towards our hotel and were about to call it a night but decided to get one more pint in the pub right by our hotel. We met a group of gentleman who were having a Bachelor Party and finally had some fun conversations with some locals. They loved our "accents", told us they liked Donald Trump (barf), and we talked about the royal family. After talking with them for a little while Megan and I were so ready to call it a night. We made our way back to our hotel and got some sleep for the travel day to Paris that lay ahead.
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