Tuesday 6 September: London Town

We spent the whole day doing tourist type things around London.

The best way of getting around London is by tube (underground railway) so we bought a 3 day pass. However you don't see much that way, so we also bought a hop-on / hop-off bus tour ticket. The weather forecast was for a fine warm day, so of course it rained. We headed back to the hotel, got our rain jackets, and the sun came out.

After driving around in the bus for a while and seeing all the main sights (Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge etc) we did a fair bit of walking around the town, and ended up near Parliament House. We had enough time to see parliament or Westminster Abbey, but not both, so we tossed a coin and the Abbey won.

Well the Abbey is a thousand years old and steeped in history, but we were pretty disappointed. The £8.00 entry fee is steep, but the extra three pounds for an audio guide is quite rude. We gave the guide a miss. Photography is banned, so we don't have any pics to show you. The place is really just a huge graveyard - though there are some pretty famous names from history buried there. What really got up our nose was the attitude of the staff, who seemed intent on getting rid of the "tourists" - the PAYING customers - so they could close the place up. Even though it was still more than an hour before the official closing time, the chapter house and museum were already closed, and they had started roping off some of the chapels. Well I guess we aren't the first people to have been ripped off by the church.

New camera: The D2H is proving to be an unsuitable tourist camera - basically it's just too heavy and bulky. So We dropped into the famous Greys of Westminster and bought a Nikon Coolpix S1 - a cute but expensive little digicam whch is very much a shirt-pocket option. The D2H will still get plenty of use, but the Coolpix will be Paul's main walking -around camera. Sue is still using her trusty D100.

On the way back to the hotel we dropped in to the science museum, and had a look at the space and computing exhibits. They were quite comprehensive, and included the world's only working example of Babbage's difference engine - the world's first real computer.

Had a very nice Italian dinner in Gloucester Road, then off to bed.