May 7
On The First Day of Our Trip Jeff Took Me to See...
One Tower Bridge!
Our trip was a total of 12 days, so I thought I would do one post per day and try and post them in order. If you want, you can try to put to song "The 12 Days of Europe" to "The 12 Days of Christmas..." We'll see how this works though!! I'm editing a LOT of photos out to spare you too much of it... I took about 4 gigs worth of photos and videos!
So we left at 8:30pm on Wednesday night to land in London on the 7th at 11:30am. The flight wasn't that bad (even if British Airways is slightly evil), it was just hard to sleep sitting up. When we landed in London though the excitement started to kick in. We were finally here!!! We hurriedly checked into our hotel and then decided we had to go and get some touring in. I was surprised at how cold it was! I'll just say weather.com is a liar! So much for the balmy 70 degrees they said to expect... 
The Tower of London was the first place we headed to after we checked into Jury's Inn, Chelsea. It was awesome to see where so much history took place. I was wishing I'd paid better attention to all the stories.... at least I remembered that William the Conqueror and Charlamagne are my great grandpa's, and they were very involved with the whole London thing. In fact, William started building the tower.
One thing I love about Europe is that roses are EVERYWHERE... and we were especially lucky going in the Spring because there were tons of flowers and the air smelt beautiful! London was also a very friendly place, we had people help us find everything all the time. And their trains are clean and easy to figure out.
This stairwell is where they found the bodies of "the little princes." Rumor has it their uncle killed them so he would be more in line for the thrown. I heard this story when I was little and it's always haunted me. It was really weird to see it in real life. ... and I'm just so glad that I wasn't royalty living back then.
After touring the crazy armour/weapon area, and seeing the magnificent crown jewels we headed over to St. Jame's park. The park was beautiful, ducks, geese and birds and overly friendly squirrels were everywhere. After a short walk, we found some dinner and then headed back to the hotel so we could pass out. Jet lag is very exciting!!!
The Tower of London was the first place we headed to after we checked into Jury's Inn, Chelsea. It was awesome to see where so much history took place. I was wishing I'd paid better attention to all the stories.... at least I remembered that William the Conqueror and Charlamagne are my great grandpa's, and they were very involved with the whole London thing. In fact, William started building the tower.
One thing I love about Europe is that roses are EVERYWHERE... and we were especially lucky going in the Spring because there were tons of flowers and the air smelt beautiful! London was also a very friendly place, we had people help us find everything all the time. And their trains are clean and easy to figure out.This stairwell is where they found the bodies of "the little princes." Rumor has it their uncle killed them so he would be more in line for the thrown. I heard this story when I was little and it's always haunted me. It was really weird to see it in real life. ... and I'm just so glad that I wasn't royalty living back then.
After touring the crazy armour/weapon area, and seeing the magnificent crown jewels we headed over to St. Jame's park. The park was beautiful, ducks, geese and birds and overly friendly squirrels were everywhere. After a short walk, we found some dinner and then headed back to the hotel so we could pass out. Jet lag is very exciting!!! 
The phone booths were pretty cool with the exception that they smelled like pee and were advertisements for hookers. We should've seen how many people we could fit in one... walking around London reminded me of The Beatles "Help!" There were so many fun streets to wander on, little church yards to see and fun shops. We took the bus around so we could enjoy seeing everything.
Shopping at Harod's... we didn't get anything except some photos with the mannequins. I do have my eye on a silverware set. If it ever drops below the $15,000 asking price... Later on we headed over to meet up with Ben and Julia at their hotel. They were a little late but it was fun once they got there! 
I forget what this statue is. Pretty sure it's really old, took a lot of money to build and has some sort of of major significance though.
It seemed like a lot of work just to do a shift change. Does this bother the people of Britain that there is such a show
Jeff was super cute-despite being really sick he made the best of a busy day. He had me hop up here to take a photo and it wasn't long before there was a line of other tourists wanting us to take their pictures as well. I should have charged.
We then ran over to see Westminster Abbey. They told us the line would be about two hours, so in hopes of killing two birds with one stone Julia and I waited in line while the boys went and scoured for some food. Only, two minutes after they left the guy on lunch break came back and opened up three more entrances and our two hour line went to a ten minute one. So, Julia and I hung out at the front of the line with a wonderful gentleman who, after we waited for an hour for the boys, gave us free tickets and told us if they didn't come soon he'd take us home when he got off. Westminster was amazing-it was totally worth the wait and I wished I'd had a whole day to spend there.
We walked through St. James again and harassed this poor guard. I wonder if he had any idea when he took this job that he would be in hundreds of tourists photos every day.
The bus dropped us off close to the National Gallery-we had twenty minutes before they closed so I ran in to the back and saw their Leonardo DaVinci sketch. It was the one with Mary and the Christ child. It was stunning to stand in front of such an old piece of work from such a great artist. I wished I could've spent more time. We also saw the Van Gogh's they had on display. Jeff recognized the flower one as one he had in the bathroom at his house growing up.
We had a very early wake up to catch our flight to Nice, France. We landed at 10:30am, got our rental car and GPS and were off by noon. It was too bad our GPS didn't work... But, just following the coast we found the beach and were so excited to get out and see the gravel. So we stopped and parked at the underground parking for the grocery store, got some French bread, and headed to the beach for a few minutes. We decided that we'd better get a move on, so we hurried back to the garage to find that apparently the French take their afternoon naps very seriously and shut and locked the garage. We were dumbfounded. Fortunately the deli girl was still in the parking lot, spoke some English and within an hour had talked the manager into coming back and freeing our car. Since she'd originally told us to come back the next morning, I was really stoked we even saw the car again. *phew*
Florence 
It took forever to see the statue of David, and please don't tell Michelangelo but I'm not sure I'd do it again. Yeah, yeah it's the world's most famous statue, but does he really deserve his very own museum? Just kidding. You're not allowed to take photos, but for what we paid and how long it took to get it, I figured... 
Driving through the Tuscany countryside. I would like a little villa like that! 
This little guy was enjoying the display pizza they set out. He'd probably eat yours, too.
Jeff was excited to see Rome. Maybe it's because he looks like Russell Crowe in Gladiator, or maybe because he just read Angels and Demons on the way there. Whatever the reason, he was excited to be there which made me excited to be there so we both had a great time. It was crazy to think of all the horrific events that happened in the center of this stadium-I guess over 9,000 animals died in the first 100 days of celebrations! They also used to fill it up with water and have naval battles in here. At one point they took the stadium floor and set it off into four sections so they could have more fights going on at a time. Sick! Then sadly, just like our stadiums, it eventually became lame to go and see. Pretty soon the only thing the coliseum was hosting were circus acts.
For seven euro you could get your picture with a bonafide gladiator. Jeff opted out after watching some tourist give the guy money, the guy grabbed his wife into a very seductive pose, just about kissed her, all the while the husband was taking photos. He then switched to another pose while the husband kept taking photos. Jeff wasn't going to pay some other guy to kiss me. 
We wandered around part of Rome and enjoyed the fountains, the statues, and most of all a hidden gelato shop. On the Island of Tiberina/Tiber/Tiberian we enjoyed local music, a walk on the river, and some genuine gelato. We knew it was the real deal and not a trap because it was half the price, twice the flavors and the Italian serving it heard our American accents and gave us half what she'd been giving her line of Italian homies. Whatever. It was still good. On the way back to the car we saw this cute graffiti. For some reason if graffiti is poetic it suddenly becomes a work of art instead of an irritation. I like that my hair is blowing in the wind-we thought it had taken the picture with the self timer and right as we looked over it had the last warning blink so we had to react quickly. It was a beautiful end to the day... considering it would take us almost ten hours to drive to Venice....