On our second day in London, we visited my favorite kind of place, a castle. On the way, we caught sight of many of the beautiful bridges over the Thames. This is the Albert Bridge with Parliament and Big Ben Clock in the background.


My favorite is the Tower Bridge. I always thought it was called London Bridge, but found out differently while crossing over it on the way to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London.


As we drove over Tower Bridge, I got a couple of cool shots.



We arrived at the Tower of London, which I expected to be a huge tower, but it's a palace with many smaller towers. It used to be where the royalty lived, and later it was where they were imprisoned for various reasons.


Lower the drawbridge and raise the gates! We're comin' in...


Cool grounds and stone walls and towers everywhere...



We saw one of those iconic British guards, who I think surely could not see a thing. Maybe it's just a convenient way to sleep on the job, as long as you can manage to sleep while standing.


We went to the Jewel House where we got to see the crown jewels, including the largest cut diamond in the world, the Star of Africa at 530 carats, which is set in the Queen's scepter. It's magnificent!


This diamond (picture from the web because we could not take pics in the Jewel House) is 2.3 inches, to give you an idea of it's size.


Finally, we had to visit Martin's Tower.


And then, for Dad, a shot of our Heathrow Express train that took us back to the airport, where we found out our flight to Munich was cancelled due to the ashcloud from the Iceland volcano.

We left for Germany the following morning, but we'll go back to London... soon!