london pictures, part three

london: day four, and oxford: days five and six. we spent another seriously busy day seeing westminster abbey, buckingham palace, wandering st. james' park, the museum of garden history, tate: britain and ended the day with a last-day-of-single-digits pre-birthday pizza dinner at zizzi's. the next morning...on gus' 10th birthday...we took the train to oxford to see his best friend george (and his mom, my dear friend, louise) and stay with them for a bit. we flew home, exhausted and missing england already, on day seven.

enjoy!

westminster abbey--seriously long wait to get inside on this day

beautiful architecture of the chapter house within

wonderful representations of animals throughout--this is the tiled floor of the chapter house

deer frescoed on the wall--it is amazing it has survived as well as it has

dromedary and kamel

gus in the cloisters of westminster. when we walked in the door we were greeted by several really eager docents who wanted to give gus the "kid's" version of westminster, which entailed his filling out a worksheet...a heavily detailed, four-paged worksheet. granted, we looked for things we probably would have otherwise missed in order to answer the questions, but for a kid with a touch of OCD this is not a good thing to have to do as we could not move on until each question was answered...

...however once he finished the worksheet he was rewarded with a giant hunk o' chocolate. (unfortunately, i was not rewarded with one as well.)

we raced over from westminster to buckingham palace for the changing of the guards

neat-o

gus in front of the royal gates--we looked everywhere for a guard to take a picture with, but never found one! i think i'm going to have to photoshop one into this shot at a later date.

st. james' park. beautiful. gus was actually at peace here, which was lovely. we ate lunch at a really tasty spot called inn the park.

gus made sure the ducks were fed, too.

shopping in london: anglican style

victoria tower gardens, along the thames

lovely little structure...

...with a non-functioning fountain

gus was pretty relaxed here, too

lovely boy emulating tower of house of parliament

gus dowsing with a dowser

lovely boy along the thames

we crossed the lambeth bridge to the museum of garden history--gus was totally a good sport for indulging me here

although this held some appeal in a good, creepy kind of way--this is one side of the monument to john tradescant, the man who brought numerous plant specimens back from the colonies to england to further botanical investigations and help spur the british passion for gardening

HAPPY 10TH BIRTHDAY GUS!!!

after that yummy breakfast we hopped a train to oxford to see...

...george!

and they were just as close as ever--nothing had changed and they were both thrilled to be together again. louise didn't tell george we were coming so we completely freaked him out (he thought he was missing school to go to the dentist until his mom stopped by the train station; he spotted gus straight away)!

george and louise at jamie oliver's italian restaurant in oxford (yum)

at which gus lost a tooth. a premolar, to be exact.

bouncing boys!

crazy bouncing boys!

seriously, some things just do not change (thankfully)

on the ride to the train station; we had to go back to london as we had an early flight out of heathrow the next morning. gus was mighty sad.

safety gus pulling a brave face for the flight home. i know he's ready to go back to england, like, yesterday (so am i). it was a phenomenal trip.