Friday, July 22, 2016

July 16: A Bridge and a Goodbye

Today David got on his plane back to Canada.  It was a late afternoon plane so we had time for an explore first.  David decided that for his last London experience he'd like to see "the fancy bridge", which we quickly determined meant the Tower Bridge.  It's the iconic bridge everyone thinks about when you say "London Bridge".  The actual London Bridge is a fairly plain thing.

So we both packed up our suitcases and left them at the hotel and headed for the "Tower Hill" tube station.  David and I are both a little nervous about heights and thought we might just view the bridge from the shore, but it has nice wide sidewalks and high railings on each side and so we felt fairly comfortable walking just a bit onto the bridge and that turned into just a bit more and that turned into all the way to the other side.  It was so pretty out over the river.  Here are a couple of views from the bridge:

and pictures taken of the bridge as we walked on it:

and of the bridge from the shore:

One of the side benefits of coming to see the Tower Bridge is that it is (not surprisingly) right by the Tower of London.  We didn't have enough time to make it worthwhile to buy tickets and go in, but we walked around the walls and could see a lot, including the famous Traitor's Gate, by which many famous people entered the Tower, including Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More.

 

I love the way that from some angles (like the last picture) you see this famous medieval fortress with some of the strangest examples of modern London architecture looming over it!

It was a lovely long walk, but then it was time to pick up our suitcases and get David onto the Heathrow Express and then I checked into my new hotel.  (The one we'd been staying in didn't have any rooms for the next few days, so I had to switch to another one nearby.)  I made myself NOT THINK about the fact that I should have been arriving in Paris and meeting my choir friends by this time.  I'm going to make lemonade out of this stupid mix-up and enjoy my extra time in London!

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