Time is running out

Our summer in London is winding down. The girls and I fly back to the U.S. this Wednesday, August 13. Darrell will be staying here awhile longer for work. We've been making return trips to our very favorite restaurants. Yesterday we went back to the Dove Tail, the Belgian pub that I wrote about here. The beer and the food are both great here, and the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed. The standout among the things we ordered this time - a starter course of a leek, walnut, and goat cheese tart. It was so good that I'm going to have to try to make something similar once we get home. After lunch, the girls found a shelf of board games and decided to play for a little while. Check out the British Monopoly board!


This afternoon, the girls and I went into London to find the Banqueting House, one of the remaining sites on our Historic Royal Palaces membership. The building is all that's left of the Palace of Whitehall, which burned down. King Charles I was executed on a scaffold outside the building. The ceiling is completely covered in paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that have survived since 1635. I think I'm about "palaced" out, because it didn't really do too much for me.

Better than the Banqueting House is what's found right across the street - the Horse Guards for Buckingham Palace. It's kind of comical. The guard sits on the horse looking straight ahead while one person after another steps up for a photo. That horse was VERY interested in Katrina, don't you think?

Here are some London Underground pictures. Since we spent a large part of our summer on and around these trains, it's only fitting to show them. The two stations we saw the most were Uxbridge, where we live, and Baker Street, which is a good connecting point for several other train lines.




I've mentioned the canals in Uxbridge and how close they are to our apartment. Here's our building. This was taken from a little footbridge that crosses the canal. The entrance to the building is on the side away from the road. The canal runs in between the building and the road (actually the road in front of the building is a bridge over the canal as well).


This photo was taken from the same bridge, looking slightly to the right of the previous one. You can see the bridge on the right that is the road in front of the building.


This photo was taken from the road, looking straight at the building. I've outlined our apartment so that you can see how very close we are to the ducks and swans that live in the canal.



And finally, here is our swan family. We hadn't seen them for a couple of weeks and were hoping they'd make another appearance before we left. The babies are still gray, but they're almost as big as the parents now.