Honeymoon- Day 12

Finally (like this blog post), the last day of our honeymoon trip in England arrived. After experiencing the lovely English rain the day before, we were greeted with sunshine and lovely weather for our final day out and about. We knew exactly what we wanted to do that day, and so our first stop was Victoria station just after the shops opened at 8am to grab breakfast. Once that was done, we successfully purchased Tube tickets for the day and got on in the direction of London towards our first stop- St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Now I must confess that this was not a cathedral I knew much about before we got there. However, it is a stunning building designed in a similar style to the US Congress building with its dome. The inside of the cathedral calls back to the Byzantine Era with mosaics decorating the ceilings and its very open and airy feel. Like all cathedrals, we found some people buried there including General Cornwallis who surrendered to the revolutionary army at Yorktown (though there was no mention of anything related to that war on his monument). However, because it is a newer (comparatively speaking) building, there were not as many people buried there, which was honestly kind of nice.

One of the neat things you can do at St. Paul’s is climb up almost to the top of the dome from where you can see nearly the whole city. It’s around 530 steps to the top, and while most of those at the bottom are nice, wide, wooden steps, you soon arrive at narrow stone steps to the base of the dome before ascending some lovely metal steps (the kinds with holes in them) to get to the very top. As I’m slightly terrified of heights, the last set of steps was not particularly pleasant for me to climb. However, the view from the top was more than worth the trip!

After our lovely time at St. Paul’s, we hopped back on the Tube and headed to the Tower of London. This famous building was once a political prison for dangerous criminals, traitors, and even different monarchs at times. Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots spent time in the tower as well as the twin prince brothers who went missing during the reign of Richard III. Since we had started early, we did miss the huge rush that came in after us, so lesson number 1 from London is go early and keep moving!

The picture above is a throne. The first part of the Tower that we entered was the royal residences where kings and queens and the court would stay for periods of time when in London. Buckingham Palace has only been used since Queen Victoria, and in the old days, kings would travel to various castles all over the country in order to maintain order and administer their territory. They would stay in the Tower when in London. I did not take a lot of pictures here either, but I will say that in one of the bedrooms they had a sound clip of a fire crackling to make it more ‘realistic.’

Our final stop in the Tower was to see the Crown Jewels. We did have to stand in line for about 10-15 minutes, but once inside it was worth the wait. Pictures of the jewels are strictly forbidden, and they even have a moving walking track that you stand on to go past the jewels. However, you can go back around and get on the walkway as many times as you like, so that was nice. They have things such as the coronation robes, the spurs worn by various monarchs, the ceremonial trumpets, and of course the crowns. These include St. Edward’s crown (the coronation crown), the Queen Mother’s crown, Queen Mary’s crown, the orb and scepter, and Queen Elizabeth’s crown as well as several other neat things. It also includes all the ceremonial banquet dishes. It was amazing to see all these things, and I must say they are all very beautiful.

Once we finished at the Tower, we took the Tube to Covent Garden to have tea and look around. We hadn’t quite decided what we wanted to do following the tower, but we wanted to have proper tea one last time before we left. We went to Whittard’s to have tea and look around. Tea was yummy and I’m excited to figure out how to make some of the little sandwiches they serve with tea. We also wandered around the tea shop and got the tea Matthew had which was a passion fruit and mango tea.

After exploring Covent Garden a little, we discovered that the London Transport Museum was right there, so we went to check it out. It covers the history of transportation in London from about the time of the ferries on the Thames, to the first railroads, to the Tube. We had a lot of fun there, plus they give you a card that you get stamped at various locations. It was also neat since we had ridden both the train and the Tube and seen many of the bridges in the area.

We came out of the Transport museum with a lot of books on transportation (mostly for Matthew :D). Once we finished there, we headed back to our hotel to deposit our treasures and finish our packing for leaving. We had an early night because our flight was early the next day. Our final dinner was at a ‘classy’ pub type place which was alright, but it seemed interesting because it had pub food but was trying to be upscale about it.

Overall, we had a fantastic time on our honeymoon! We were ready to come home by the end of it, but we’ve been told that’s a good thing and meant that the trip was the right length. The places we went were amazing and we walked every day until our feet hurt which I guess was good as well. The history of England is fascinating and is visible wherever you go. There were things we missed about the US, or things we thought were strange, but that could be a post all to itself. It was a great trip, and we hope to go back someday and catch things we didn’t get to see this time around.