Building our McPhi-ego: Europe Trip Part 4: London and York

Thursday morning we headed back to London to start the rest of our adventure in the United Kingdom. We had originally planned on renting a car in London; however, we hadn't made a reservation yet and so when went to book it we found out all of the rental cars in London were sold out. Figures.

No problem though. We found a bus that was leaving for York at 11pm that evening, and there were plenty of rental cars available there. The whole situation actually worked out for the better because driving in London would have been horrible and the Tower of London would have been packed when we got back due to the jubilee weekend. So we booked our bus tickets and a rental car and went out to enjoy the unexpected day in London.

We started out by enjoying a traditional English breakfast. Well, I did, Michael was still pining for more pastries.

Our first stop was Westminster Abbey.

I really liked the entrance.

We weren't allowed pictures, but I just loved the stained glass. This was inside the chapel not the main building. Sshhhh.

My thoughts on Westminster, "Lots of dead people. Interesting history. Lots of dead people with interesting histories. Fun place to explore."

More Jubilee decoration.

Next we went to the Tower of London.

We didn't have a lot of time so in our rush to see everything we didn't take a lot of pictures.

The Tower of London was pretty cool. It was a life changing moment for Michael and I as we had spent our entire lives up to this point thinking the Tower of London was just one tower, when really it's a castle with many towers.

The Beefeater tour is a must. We didn't get a picture with one because someone Michael, thought it would be too cliche. The line was also too long and we didn't have time to waste.

We went through the crown jewels exhibit, which had a special addition for the jubilee weekend.

Michael liked the armory because of this Dragon made entirely of weaponry and armor.

Just another day keepin' out the bad guys :)

We were able to see Tower Bridge, formerly London Bridge (which now resides in Arizona), from the outer walls of the Tower of London.

After spending many an hour exploring the Tower of London we enjoyed a picnic dinner at a park nearby.

We then spent the rest of the evening looking for an internet cafe. I had brought the camera and what I thought was the cord to the computer. Sadly, it was the wrong cord and so we had no way of emptying our SD cards, which by this time were completely full.

The bus ride to York was 6 hours so we arrived around 5am. We had booked a Travelodge so we could shower and get a few more hours of sleep since York would be pretty dead when we got there. It was both eerie and really neat to walk through the town at 5am with no one else around.

York was a very pleasant surprise. After spending all of our time so far in big cities, this quaint little town was refreshing. The people were much friendlier and it was nice to be able to walk everywhere. Our favorite part, though, were the pasties (pronounced past-e Michael and I kept calling them paste-es). They had every kind of pasty imaginable and they were all super cheap.

We started our morning off with a breakfast pasty (literally called a breakfast pasty, they also had lunch and dinner pasties), two apple strudel pasties, and a pork and apple pasty.