Wimbledon - Day 18

So, today ended up being more a tourist day than a work day. We started out with a tube trip to the London Eye. It turned out I made the mistake of not booking on-line, and that meant we had to call the ticket office and then pay 2 pounds more per ticket than we could have if I had just booked them on-line. Oh well. It was an impressive ride. The capsule is a large bubble that is completely enclosed. They put a mobile A/C unit in them, so it is even fairly temperate. There is a bench in the center, and handrails around the outside, but for the most part, the bubble is just enclosed glass. I was quite white knuckled as I sat on the center bench the whole time, but I did manage to look out and see some wonderful views of London. Definitely worth the time to go, and of course paying for the fast track ticket was well worth the time, as we ended up getting on early and bypassed a fairly large queue to get on.

Hey look kids! There it is, Big Ben and Parliament. That became the joke of the vacation. We couldn't stop thinking about National Lampoon's European Vacation and them getting stuck in the traffic Island near the two famous landmarks. We of course took pictures of the clock, the building and the roundabout they were stuck in. It made us giggle, which is all we want from a vacation anyway.

Saw Westminster Abbey, though only from the outside. We would have had to wait in a queue that looked to be hours long, based on the sweaty visages I saw, so we decided it was a church, and the inside wouldn't be worth that kind of wait in line. We hoofed it over to the Hard Rock Cafe, but Colleen decided she didn't really want anything from the store after all. We wandered all over town, opting to allow me the chance to finish one of the pub crawls, from the Dick Whittington Ale Trails. That meant 5 pints in five different bars, and did include a bit of pub grub at the first. It wasn't too bad after all.

We popped into the King's Head for dinner and discovered it was Trivia night. I didn't expect to do well, as the questions would be slanted toward pop culture England style, but I did want to play. In the end, I got a free pint for knowing that Lleyton Hewitt was married to Beck Cartwright, the Australian Soap star. That made it more fun. We only got 13 out of 25, so we weren't even in the running for the cash jackpot. Oh well. We got in touch with BJ and Judy and we managed to meet them for a pint and then we cleaned out the fridges in our rooms of all the purchased beer. It seemed odd that after three separate instances where folks had brews they purchased themselves down at the bar, that this would be the time we'd get hassled. It meant we had to go up to BJ's room to finish up, and I guess that wasn't too bad.

Feeling more than a bit tipsy, we decided to call it a night. We all had to travel anyway. Just some of us were moving on to our next phase and some were going home.

Cheers!