I'd walk a thousand miles just to see you tonight

So if i ever wanted to know what it felt like to be hit by a truck, i now know. Don't worry, i wasn't actually hit by a truck, but walking around London all day it sure felt like it. I still am really sore and it feels like i ran a marathon (not that i have any idea what that feels like) but it was sooo worth it! :D

We got up super early and got the 7:45 bus to London and tried to sleep on the 2 hour ride there. I dozed on & off a little but mostly was awake the whole time. When we got there, we weren't exactly sure what to do or where to go, but followed a map to Buckingham Palace. There were tons of tourists around (i didn't hear a British accent alot so that was sorta funny) but the palace was gorgeous! It was a lot bigger than i thought with gold gates surrounding it. The flag was up on top of the building and Tyler said that that means the Queen is there, but I'm not sure that's right haha It would be pretty cool if it was though! We were all sorta disappointed because the guards in red coats with the funny hats weren't there and i really wanted a picture with one. I'm not sure why they weren't there that day, but my dad told me that the city was on alert for some terrorist thing yesterday so maybe that's why, but i didn't get any feeling that people were afraid at all. (though, i am glad that i found out about that after i was back at school ;) So we took tons of pictures there and at the fountain across the street for awhile, then we noticed a bunch of guard-looking guys wearing helmets and carrying swords on horses were trotting down the street and all the tourists rushed to the road to take pictures. I got really excited because i thought it was a motorcade (or i guess a horse-cade in this case ha!) for the queen or the princes but then realized that the cars behind the horses were just ordinary taxis and street sweepers and just wanted to get around them. We realized later that the guys on horses were headed to this other building (we still didnt know what it was) for some sort of changing of the guard thing. We just saw a huggge crowd of people surrounding a roped off area where the guys in red were lined up facing these guys in black all on horses. They just stood there for awhile & then at exactly 11:30..more guys in red came, got in line, and then they all left. I'm still not sure what this meant, but it seemed pretty exciting! We Then we walked to Westminster Abbey which was soo beautiful! we got tickets to go inside and i was pretty bummed when i found out we couldn't take pictures. Brittany and i still snuck some though ;) The inside of it was absolutely breathtaking and i really dont think pictures would have done it justice. The coolest part for me was walking around the rooms with all the graves of past kings and royal people. As we were looking at the graves, i was thinking about how cool it is that these people were so important that people like us today want to take pictures of where they're buried. How cool is that?! I can't even imagine being that prominent that tourists are paying to see my grave. Whoa. Maybe it'll happen someday when i marry prince harry ;) So we stayed in there for a long time and then left to take 9837459834 pictures of Big Ben. I felt like I needed to take pictures of "him" from every single angle and ended up with a bunch that looked exactly the same haha We then went to the London Eye, which is like a big ferris wheel (the biggest in the world actually) but there are like 30 people in each "pod" and you can walk around in it and take pictures. We had ordered tickets for it ahead of time so the line wasn't too long. It took us about 30 mins to get the whole way around and it was soooo cool! No matter how many pictures i took, i just couldn't capture how beautiful the view was. After our ride, we walked along the river for a long time and saw mimes and other street performers and also the millenium bridge (which u can see in the most recent harry potter movie :) and the globe theatre. By this time, it was dark so the view of London was gorgeous. We decided to walk all the way back to where our bus was going to pick us up and then have dinner, but it was a veryyy long walk. We were starting to get kind of grumpy and tired by the time we found somewhere decent to eat. Ironically it was called "The American Steakhouse" or something like that, but i got my cheeseburger that i was craving for so long so i was okay with not eating somewhere British. Then we ran to catch our bus and collapsed the second we got in our seats. Brittany googled it when we got back to school and we had walked over 10 miles the whole day and i was definitely feeling it. I was very sore and tired and couldn't wait to climb into bed :) I slept for a really really long time!

Today, after getting up at almost 2pm, i went to the store with Britt to get food because tonight i was making dinner! We came back, made the shepherds pie and popped it in the oven right before we went to church. The service was pretty good, although we didn't sing any songs i knew, which bugs me a little bit. Next week we're going to try the earlier service to see if we like it more. We got back and dinner was delicious :) it definitely reminded me of home! Well i should head to bed because i have a veryyy busy day tomorrow, complete with 3 two hour classes, so I'll need all the energy i can get. Sorry this is so long! goodnight :)