Friday, January 9, 2009

First Day in London

Anytime we went into London we took the train. It is a 10-15 min walk from my parents flat, then about a 30-45 min train ride to the station in London. Then we could get on the Tube(subway) and get to pretty much anywhere we wanted to. The first day we went into London we went to the London Transport Museum where they had the history of the Tube system and buses etc. They had a lot of interactive displays or old train cars that you could get in, they even had an area where the kids could put on the uniforms of the various drivers. This was fun and the kids enjoyed it. Then we went to the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms the kids weren't very excited about this but I LOVED it. Most everything was exactly how it was left at the end of the war(because the rooms were sealed up after the war ended)or had been recreated to look like it was. If you are a WWII buff a definite must see. And since this is just down the street from the Westminster Abbey we spent about an hour and a half there. There are also some pictures of Big Ben because it was on the corner across from the Tube station(it rained while we were in the Churchill Museum and the sun had come out so that's why some of Big Ben are cloudy and then sunny. It was getting late enough in the day that the pictures I took outside the Abbey are kind of dark due to loss of daylight. Jeremy enjoyed seeing the Domino's delivery drivers on their little motor bikes.

Duxford Imperial War Museum

This was one of the coolest Museums, they had AWESOME exhibits with airplanes, tanks, some boats a mini sub. We were kind of expecting something like the Pima Air Museum(a bone yard for retired planes) here in Tucson and this went above and beyond it. We got to get up close to a lot of it and we even got to walk through a Concord test plane. And this place was HUMONGOUS. We didn't go into every hanger they had and still spent 3-4 hours there. They had some WWII exhibits that were fascinating being as they were from the British point of view and battles that were important to them, a perspective that I hadn't thought of before really but wished I could have spent more time on.