Sunday was quite the sightseeing day for me.  I started off in York where I’d been attending a weekend conference, with little time to take in all the fabulous things to see except from the outside.  But I got a few shots of York Minster from the outside

And then I met my husband at a pub in borough to do the childcare handover thing.  Unfortunately, the pub we chose didn’t allow children, which they only told us after we ordered food.  They let us eat, though.  And Bill was fortunately remarkably well-behaved, only kicking up a slight fuss when I wouldn’t let him play the fruit machine.

I left Simon with his role-playing chums and Bill and I went off to tour the South Bank and take lots of different forms of transport.

We went up via London Bridge station and Bill was desperate to go on the HMS Belfast.  But it costs a lot of money.  And frankly I didn’t fancy chasing him around a cruiser single-handed.  It’s all a bit head-banging low doorways or gangways or portals or whatever they call doors on ships and treacherous stairs and railings inadequate to prevent a small boy from flinging himself into the Thames.

I told him we couldn’t go on the ship but he spotted the entrance.  Clever boy.

Fortunately he was distracted by the elephants currently populating London.  He wanted to ride the elephants, but I’m not sure that that’s allowed.  And anyway, their high, slippery fibreglass backs looked quite dangerous.

He dashed from pachyderm to pachyderm in front of the GLA building.

We crossed Tower Bridge on foot – something I’d never done before, and well worth doing.  It took some persuasion to get him to pose on one of the few safe areas of the balustrade.  He slumped in his stroller and said “I too tired.  I very, very tired Mommy.”  His latest phrase whenever we want him to something that he doesn’t quite fancy.

But I told him if he posed for a few pictures we could go and see the castle on the other side.   We didn’t go into the Tower of London either.  Another costly tourist attraction.  But we enjoyed an ice cream moatside:

And stopped to look at the Traitor’s Gate.  Bill asked me if that’s where princesses went, and it certainly was.  I tried to explain that it was mostly for ‘bad people’ but sometimes princesses used that gate, too.  I told him how Princess Elizabeth had gone through those doors and up those steps, but that she was one of the few to come out again free.  And that she wasn’t bad.   He nodded.

Because the Northern Line was closed for the weekend, we needed to either catch a train home from London Bridge or Waterloo or catch a dire ‘replacement bus’ from Kennington.  Since he’d said he wanted to ride a boat, we caught the Thames Clipper from the Tower up the Thames to Waterloo.  If you have an Oyster card loaded with cash or a travel card you get a nice discount and fabulous views of the Thames.

At Waterloo, the dock sits right underneath the London Eye and Bill wanted to ‘ride the eggs’.  But that also costs money (there’s a theme here).  And anyway, I’ve taken my last ride on a Ferris Wheel of any description since my mother’s neighbor fell from the top of one while riding with her grandson at the fair in Lawrenceburg a couple of years ago.  (She lived!).

At this point, Bill was genuinely tired of having his photo taken from the outside of visitor attractions.  “I don’t like pictures,” he told me.

But he likes rides.  By the end of the day he’d ridden the Underground, the Overground, a commuter boat and a bus.  Exciting day, even if we didn’t go in any pay attractions.