After getting up on time, eating breakfast on time, and heading to the coach station on time we left on our “vintage” open-top double-decker bus for a morning tour in London. We didn’t take lots of pictures because we just sat back and enjoyed the view.

Tower Bridge

“Faith Hope and Love: The guiding virtues of Queen Alexandra.”

Then we went with our tour group to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

Watching the changing of the guard involved running through a park where we saw a cute duck family.

Mom, I saw this bromeliad and thought of you!

Then we finished with a boat tour on the Thames (pronounced “tems” for those curious) before taking a lunch at the bus station and hopping on our wonderfully air-conditioned coach bus to Stonehenge. We made some friends on the bus: a group of ladies from America doing a tour of Europe together. Asa has decided coach buses are the best because you can meet people and talk to people. After getting a bit of a late start from the station, we were on the road (about 2 hours drive each way). Stonehenge was beautiful and awe-inspiring. At first I was a little disappointed that they ran out of audio guides but I saw in the brochure that you could download a guide in the app store so we used my phone to do that.

The heel stone up close.

The horizontal stones are called lintel stones and are unique to Stonehenge. On top of the standing stones there are bumps that match divvets in the lintels to hold them in place.

Cal wanted a picture with the “holding the stones” pose failing.

You can see some mounds in the distance here (one is on the horizon just left of the middle) called barrows. They are ancient burial mounds that dot the landscape around Stonehenge.

A Nova-sized monolith that visitors can touch. They don’t allow regular visitors to enter the stone circle. For a high price you can visit before or after regular hours and enter the circle.

We got back on the coach and headed back to London. I booked a bus from our arrival station to Stansted airport where we have a hotel booked for tonight. After our plans changed due to the cancelled flight, we hoped to stay at the DoubleTree we were already at in London for the extra two days. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a big enough room available for tonight. We decided that if we had to change hotels, we might as well move closer to the airport we fly out of tomorrow.

Sunset over the Thames spotted on our bus to the airport.

London’s airport situation is kind of confusing. There is one airport in the city of London and that’s called London City Airport and it’s reserved mostly for business travelers. Heathrow is the major international airport and it’s located just outside of the city. There are three other airports as well–Stansted, Gatwick and Luton–which are all about 45-90 minutes outside of the city center. Tomorrow we fly from Stansted at about 10am so being close will make the morning easier and less stressful. We chose a hotel just 6 minutes walk from the airport.