British Museum and Buckingham Palace

Here's a quick recounting of an exceptionally busy day in London: we saw the students off on their various adventures, then made our way to St. James Park before meeting Peter and his family for lunch at a gastropub (where I asked the waitress if they had diet soda, and she wrinkled her nose and gave a disgusted shake of her head, then after a moment added, "Well, we do have Diet Coke..."). Then we took a double-decker bus to the British Museum. The museum is so ridiculously huge (over 2 1/2 miles of galleries!) that we were all overwhelmed, but the kids found trailguides (John did the Nile, and Emma chose dragons) that had them cover some good ground relatively quickly. We hit the highlights--the Parthenon, Cleopatra's mummy, the Rosetta Stone, Aphrodite--after the kids did their trails. They were ready to leave, so we kept telling them that we were sure that the exit was just on the other side of this one last exhibit. After we could fool them no longer into absorbing culture, we found another double-decker bus thanks to David's navigation of the bus system which took us past Parliament and Downing Street and dropped us off in front of Westminster Abbey. We walked around, then got some ice cream for the kids and walked to Buckingham Palace. We watched the guards for a few minutes, then hopped back on the Tube to the area near our hotel (the kids are doing the Tube navigation...see photo of them in St. James Park with the map) for some much-needed Indian food!