God Bless America, My Home Sweet Home

Yep, we are home, back in the US and here to stay. We had a wonderful time in England and were sad to say goodbye but we are happy to be back with our family and friends. The trip home was long but fine. We arrived on the 29th and have spending the past few days getting settled.


This is actually my excuse for my lack of blogging...moving internationally is a lame excuse I know but I'm blogging now and hope you will forgive my extended absence. It has been a long time since I last updated the blog but I guess the best place to pick back up is where I left off...so here is a little backtracking...

While still in England we enjoyed one final site seeing trip and spent a long weekend in London.

Here is the Tower Bridge, obviously. Tower Bridge is ornamented with brilliant blue, white, red, and gold paint. It was quite a sight to behold. We were invited to go up the tower and walk across the sky bridge for a mere £7.00 a person. I pretended I was afraid of heights and politely declined.

The London Bridge wasn't what I expected. After walking the brightly painted and overly decorated Tower Bridge I was thinking the London Bridge would be ten times more extravagant...but it wasn't, it was just a plain practical bridge. We walked across it as pictured above and we floated under it as pictured below.

We took a boat cruise which was one of my favorite parts of our trip, perhaps that was because Spencer fell asleep. We cruised the river for just over an hour while a guide told us fun facts about the various structures and buildings we passed.


We also took a bus tour. Our bus tickets allowed us to hop on and off the buses as much as we liked within a 24 hour period. Some buses had live tours where actual guides told us facts and stories about London. Other buses had prerecorded guides you could listen to with a headset. The best part of the tour was riding on the second level of the double decker buses.


Another of our favorites were the motionless guards.

Something interesting I learned about these guards is that the knifes on top of their guns are fake and in order to be a guard at Buckingham Palace one has to first serve on the front line in battle. Only the bravest of men can protect the Queen.

We also enjoyed the changing of the guards ceremony...

At this time of year the changing of the guards ceremony takes place every other day usually in the morning. However on this particular day there was a marathon which closed down several roads and prevented the ceremony from happening. We were disappointed, we thought we missed out on our opportunity to see the guards change. BUT, instead of canceling the service they just moved it to later in the afternoon. It wasn't a full service, they didn't have a drum procession or anything but it was still interesting.

We also got this clip of the changing of the horses. We captured better footage in this video than we did in the last one...

Of course as we toured around London we took pictures and whenever Spencer sees the camera he gets excited and starts posing...so here is a picture of our little poser.

He is such a ham.