Monday 12:30pm (12.30---whoa, they match!), by the side of the River Thames, London

I just went on the London Eye flight, like a colossal ferris wheel, standing just across Westminster Bridge from Big Ben and the famous Houses of Parliament.

This sucker is huge...135 metres tall (which is something like 400 feet)... The so called 'flight' takes 30 minutes and goes at a stately pace in a climate controlled capsule. My capsule was full of German-speaking tourists. I took lots of great pictures, or pictures I hope look as good as I think they do....it is overcast, but bright, so I could not tell how they looked.

I made my first two stupid tourist mistakes: one today and one yesterday---neither one was too bad. Yesterday I went to the cash machines to get some money (that's the problem with being a tourist. It costs money.). On the way there, I picked up a big, frosty bottle of water. I set the bottle, unopened, on a table near the cash machine, then turned, got £40, turned around and my water was GONE. Some crafty bugger got a free bottle of water, thanks to the American tourist. The lesson is, never leave anything unattended in London. It only cost me a pound at least.

Today, I decided to go on the London Eye and the attendant River Cruise. I got my tickets, walked out and suddenly realised, the combined fee was £55!!! That's not dollars, son, that's a lots of money. I looked in my hand and discovered, I had two tickets for each!!! It was easy to walk through the queue and get £27.50 put back on my card, but a little embarassing. A pound is almost two dollars, so that's a pretty dangerous mistake...and yeah, I did pay the equivalent of $55 for the two events, but they were totally worth it.

Getting a bit of a blister on my third toe of the left foot. Londoners not only walk everywhere, but London is no place for those who hate stairs. On the plus side, I've walked more this weekend than I normally walk in a week. I will HAVE to go to Jeannie or Mary or Lianna and get a massage when I get back to Dallas.


Monday a bit later (maybe 14.30 or so) in a nearby sandwich shop at Embankment Tube Station, London
The other hotel owner, Mark, Simon's brother, was there this morning. He loaned me a small handbook called London A-Z (remember, the final letter of the alphabet is pronounced 'zed' here...which, cool as it is, does seem like it might detract from that ABCs song we sang as kids). It is like a miniature London Mapsco (a reference probably lost on non Dallasites!)---a tiny map book with every tube stop, street, and landmark clearly marked. It's been a lifesaver...On the Eye, I looked about and identified a lot of landmarks, buildings, and streets.

Boats and maritime stuff like that have always been a source of fascination for me. I'm not sure why, coming from landlocked Dallas, but maybe it's a matter of loving the exotic. The river tour was money very well spent...we saw tons of landmarks and I took a lot more pictures (all hail digital photography!), which I'll put up on Flickr when I get back to Dallas.

After that, I set out to find some lunch, across the appropriately named "Hungerford Bridge." Now, I know that I didn't come a quarter of the way around the globe to eat at Quizno's, but a club sammich sounded really good, and the place is right here next to the tube station; Also, they have odd British-y flavours of chips...I mean crisps. They're actually different names for basically the same things we have in the good old USA: barbecue rib (think BBQ), cheese and onion (very similar to nacho cheese), and vinegar and sea salt (which we call...vinegar and sea salt...pretty much).