First day exploring London

Kensington Gardens

Thames Walk

Yesterday we spent the day exploring London. I put several of the pictures that we took up on our Picasa Web Album – just click on the picture of Big Ben to go to the rest of the album. I also included a map of our journey around town. If you click on the map above, it should open in a new window for you. I numbered a few key spots that I’ll refer to in this post. When you look at the map, the dark red area indicates where we walked, and the dotted blue line indicates travel via the London Underground.

Let me just start by saying that we walked so much yesterday – we’re both a little sore today. My pedometer showed 26, 714 steps when we got home and I took it off. That’s about 12.6 miles

We left our apartment (# 1 on the map) yesterday morning about 11am and walked up to Hyde’s Park (# 2). We spent some time admiring the Albert Memorial and taking some nice pictures. Then we walked around in the park until we got to the Round Pond in front of Kensington Palace. We wandered around the gardens and then had lunch at the Orangery at Kensington Palace.

After lunch we left the park and retraced our steps a bit. We headed for South Kensington Station (# 3) to catch the Tube and travel to Monument Station (# 4). Once we arrived, we walked past The Monument (after stopping to take a picture, of course) and across the London Bridge. We met up with some friends at the Borough Market (# 5), an outdoor market open to the public on Friday and Saturday. There were so many vendors selling everything you can think of. We had a great time, and I’m sure that we’ll be back. The picture I have from the market doesn’t do it justice. I just was so busy looking around that I forgot to take any pictures. If you look closely in the background of the picture you will see a lot of red and yellow umbrellas – those are all vendors at the market. It was incredible!

After making our purchases, we all decided to walk along the south bank of the River Thames. We passed several street performers, a sidewalk artist and the London Eye. We didn’t wait in line to ride on it, though. We’ll do that another time. We also passed under the Millennium Bridge, which is a pedestrian bridge that connects the Tate Modern museum to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

We made our way back across the river and over to St. James Park (# 6). On the way we passed Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. We walked passed the Horse Guard’s Parade and then through the park and along the mall toward Buckingham Palace. There were many flags surrounding the palace. Normally, all of the flags displayed are the British Flag. However when a foreign dignitary is visiting, then that country’s flag is also displayed. As you can see by the picture we took, the President of Ghana was visiting the Queen this week.

We made our way to Victoria Station (# 7) and hopped on the Tube headed for Soho (# 8). We went to a bar called The Star for cocktails then found a little Italian place for dinner. After dinner our friends took a cab home and we found the Oxford St. Tube Station down the street and headed home ourselves.

It was a long day, and we saw so much. I truly tried not to go on about everything as not to bore you with information you might not be interested in. However, if you are interested, I’ve included several links for more information about the various sites we observed throughout the day. Just click on something that sounds interesting. There is quite a lot of information. I admit that is one of the reasons it has taken me so long to write relatively little about such a long day. Every time I wrote of a place we had been, I wanted to find out more information. Consequently it has taken me all day to simply get this post completed. Oh well, at least now it is finished. I hope you enjoy!