Pictures of our European Vacation - England

This is continuation of pictures from our vacation. Again a continuation so if you have not first looked at the blog post titled "Pictures of our European Vacation-Netherlands" or of "Belgium" for the sake of everything good and holy, STOP READING!!! Go read the other posts first PLEASE!!!!

London, England
After Belgium, we traveled down through France into England. This was an adventure because I just put London in TomTom and it took us into England under the English Channel. We actually drove into a train car and then the train made its way through a tunnel that is under the English Channel.

After arriving in London, we got a decent nights rest because we knew the next day was going to be very busy. Our first stop was the London Eye. For those of you not familiar with what this is, it is basically a very large Ferris Wheel. Instead of seats, you are in a glass pod that you can walk around in. Each pod holds about 20 people.

Here is Alex hanging out as we are going up on the eye.

A view of Big Ben from the eye.

Isaac, Billy and Alex

Hannah and Jessica, aren't they cute!

The next stop was the Tower of London. I was surprised to find that this was much more than a castle but it was actually a fortress. It was large enough for a small town and had shops, homes, gardens and pretty much everything a town would need to survive. This is where the crown jewels are stored and displayed.

After walking on top of much or the outside wall and visiting several towers, we were all ready a rest and a snack. Here are all the kids chilling out.

One of the rare pictures with all 9 travelers inside one of the towers within the Tower of London.

Here is just a cool picture of Alex daring to crawl to look out of one of the interesting windows that line the outside walls.

After the Tower of London, we continued on to Stonehenge which is about an hours drive outside of London. This was much cooler than I expected. The stones are huge and it is just amazing imagining what it looked like 4000 years ago when the first stones were placed here.

We were able to walk around and through the stones which few people ever get to do and they only allow it after normal visiting hours. There were only a few other people there so we were able to get a lot of pictures with just us.






The next day we went to church in the center of London. It was nice for us to here a Sacrament Meeting in English for the first time in 6 months. After church we went to the London Zoo. This is the recognized as the first zoo in the world. It opened to the public somewhere around 1840.


There was a petting zoo which the kids liked.


Here is where they filmed the snake scene in the first Harry Potter film.


Isaac and Billy at the entrance to the reptile house.



This is one of two statues we saw that was dedicated to the winnepeg bear that later became to be know as Winnie-the-Pooh. It was here that A.A. Milne brought his son Christopher Robin Milne to see a bear that Christopher fell in love with. Near this statue is a picture of Christopher posing with that bear.