On our first free day in London, being a bit of a military history and World War II buff, I went off to visit the Imperial War Museum. My wife took the opportunity to catch up on sleep and later visit Harrod’s. We then met up at the London Eye, where my wife had reserved mid-afternoon tickets, which gave us spectacular views of London.
On the way, I made a stop at the Sherlock Holmes Museum at, yes, 221 Baker Street. Due to timing and the wait (a large group had just arrived, I opted to just visit the quaint adjacent gift shop where I chatted with the door greeter, a native London gal who happened to be Asian, dressed as Mrs. Hudson.
While I took the Underground, and even took my first ride on one of London’s iconic double decker public buses to get around as directed by GoogleMaps, my wife ended up taking a black taxi ride to the London Eye, where she had a pro-Trump cabbie who, after learning she was American, went on a rant about how nice it was to have the power to jail people, when they encountered s protest that inconveniently slowed their ride lol. (To be fair, while she waited for me outside the St. Martin’s Theatre while I hit the loo, a British gentleman made wry comments about the president when she learned she was from the states.) My wife had gotten us timed tickets for the London Eye, so we got on fairly quickly.
Afterwards, we visited Big Ben (officially now Elizabeth Tower) and Westminster Abbey. We’d seen Big Ben on our first day tour but hadn’t approached it from its iconic side, so walked over. A lot of street vendors selling cheap souvenirs lol
We considered visiting the National Portrait Gallery, but learned it was closing at 1 pm for a private event—there was a current exhibition of the Bayeux Tapestry on loan from France that I would have liked to see, since it’s often cited as an early example of a comic strip-like narrative.
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