So, we caught the Tube to Trafalgar and jumped on the first of their buses that came along.
This was a really good idea for giving us a good general look about London.
We stayed on the bus until the London Eye, and then got off and had a ride on the Eye. It was a good time to do this; the queue was quite short and we only had to wait a few minutes. The wait can be a lot longer; we were told later that the Eye was only meant to be in place for 5 years but it's still there 14 years later because its such a huge money-spinner - on a good summer's day they can apparently make £300,000 for the day! You can even get married in the Eye these days - prices start from £2,800
Unfortunately today there was a lot of mist / smog today and so many of the usual sights were unclear or not visible at all:
Regardless of this though, I thought it was well worth the money. This is our view of another pod when up high in the Eye:
After the ride on the Eye, we walked across the Westminster Bridge and got onto one of the free river cruises that comes as part of the bus ticket. We only went a fairly short distance - down to the Tower of London. We had some lunch there while trying to decide whether or not we'd go into the Tower and in the end we decided not to, not yet anyway; today was going to be a day for general touring around and we decided to stick with that.
So, we got back onto the bus and went back to Leicester Square, near to where we originally started. Then we thought we'd do another of their tours, this one their tour of Museums. I wasn't quite sure where to catch this bus, and while waiting to talk to one of their staff members a lady came up and started berating her about the apparent failure of this particular bus to arrive - she just kept shouting about waiting for 40 minutes. This was a bit of a concern but we thought we'd go and wait, and it actually only took about 10 minutes until one turned up.
Unfortunately, a few minutes into this ride, the promised "thundery showers" in today's weather forecast hit us, big time. And, this was the only bus we got onto today that didn't have a partial cover over the upper deck - we all had to dive downstairs.
It was pretty much a lost cause after this - first the downstairs started flooding from all the water pouring down from above, and then once the rain stopped it got really hot and steamy. So, we hopped off and decided to come back to the apartment to regroup.
I didn't go out again, but Paul did; there was a game shop not too far away that he wanted to visit and I took the opportunity to have a rest and start some serious looking at tomorrow's travels. However, in the end, we decided to leave the final decision until tomorrow.
A couple of other photos from today:
Tower Bridge - we were told later that because the bridge contains parts that move over water, Lloyds of London insists it must be insured as a ship and so must always be manned by a captain and a number of other standard maritime crew members. This actually appears to be a true story!
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