The day, unlike the day before, was cloudy and cold. Haha, typical England weather. 😛 Anyway, the first item on our agenda for the day was to visit Saint Pauls cathedral. You had to pay for a tour, which we thought was odd, but they did provide some audio tour headsets for walking around. It was cool to listen to the history of the church and to hear how it came to be (it was actually the third cathedral to be built on the site). As part of the tour, we were able to go the galleries above the ground floor of the church so you could see the artwork in church’s dome. You were also able to go outside of the dome to the top to get a really good view of London.
After that, we headed to the Walkie-Talkie building (not sure what the proper name is for it) to the Sky Garden on the top floor. It was just a public space at the top the building that offered some more good views of London. It was pretty cool but we only stayed there for a bit.
After that, we headed to the Tower of London so check out the sites there. Before we went in, we got some Subway for lunch and noticed that everyone was staring in the same direction. After being really confused for a bit, we found out that they were going to be doing a canon salute in honor of the Queen’s 90th birthday. So after a while, it started and there were a lot of cannons going off for a while. Kind of cool to see. Once inside the Tower of London, we joined along with a free Yeoman Warden tour of the place. Yeoman Warden are the official protectors of the Tower of London and are dressed up in period costumes. They even get to live inside the tower. The tour was about two hours long and the guide was pretty entertaining and informative. Some the highlights were walking along the defensive walls and seeing the crown jewels.
Once done with the Tower of London (we stayed until closing), we headed to where Joshua McDonald-Smith was living in London. Elder McDonald-Smith, as I knew him, actually served in the South Bay singles ward when I was the ward mission leader. When he was here in the ward, I found out that he was from Catford, which was the first area of my mission. While we were there, we had dinner with just him and his grandma that he was living with. The food we had was goat soup, which was different, to say the least. Haha, but the grandma was a fun lady to visit with. And boy does she have a strong personality too. 😛 As we were waiting for Josh’s twin brother, Daniel, to come home, she kept insisting that she was going to travel back with us part way back to our flat. It took a lot of convincing that I was familiar with London enough to be safe for her to back down off that. 😛
Once Daniel was home, we took a picture together and walked with them back to the train station to head home. That night we watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows together, but we both fell asleep. Yep, we’re the perfect married couple. 🙂
