Day 13 – London (St. Paul’s Cathedral, Tower of London and Harry Potter)

After a great night’s sleep in our little room, Peter & I went looking for somewhere to have breakfast.

Now I know Soho is the red light district but it’s a bit much to walk around the corner and have all manner of things displayed in a window!

St Paul’s Cathedral

Our first stop was St Paul’s Cathedral. The Cathedral was beautiful! The dome is so high! and the art work is stunning! Peter & I climbed the 528 steps to the Golden Gallery while Silvia & John stayed below.

When you get to the Golden Gallery (which is the very top) there is a piece of glass in the floor where you can look 85 metres down to the floor of the cathedral (it made my legs go wobbly!).

The views of London from the top of the Cathedral were wonderful!

The Tower of London

Our next stop was the Tower of London which we walked to from the Cathedral. Let me just say that without Peter & his trusty Google maps we would have been completely lost!

When we got to the Tower it was packed! We already had tickets so we went to the group entrance. Whilst standing in line for Crown Jewels there was a medieval reenactment happening around us and a woman dressed in the era was looking for someone and calling out Dave so John naturally joined in and started a conversation and became part of the reenactment (even though he was right out of character and date). Peter stood in the line for us to see the Crown Jewels while Silvia, John & Kylie looked in the White Tower. Unfortunately once we came out of seeing the Crown Jewels we didn’t really have time to see anything more of the Tower of London.

We found out later that it was a public holiday & that was why it was so busy.

We also had tickets for the Tower Bridge but unfortunately we didn’t get time to go in there.

We had to make our way back to our hotel as we were going to Warner Bros studios to see the Harry Potter backstage tour.

Harry Potter

We got to the studio where we had to go through security, and I mean they had to check every part of the back pack and my hand bag. We then had to stand in line again until they let us into a room.

We then got to sit down and watch a short film with Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, maybe 10mins long describing the experience and concludes with the three of them going through the massive door to the Great Hall, then the screen slides up and behind the screen the actual doors to the Great Hall appear. They open the doors and you get to enter the Great Hall! It was brilliantly done.

We got to see pretty much all the props from the movies, they had all the costumes displayed. I got to ride a broom stick in front of a green screen and have my photo taken (and boy do they charge for it, everything is so expensive!).