The Tower of London

On Friday morning, we had our first "Group Excursion", which took us to the famous Tower of London.  (The Tower of London started out with The White Tower built by William the Conquerer in about 1060ish, and then eventually other towers and buildings (like the Bloody Tower) were built around it, moat and all.  I could give a much greater history of it but I would rather talk about me instead.  haha).

A not very good picture of where we went:

We entered in through Traitor's Gate (kind of funny because it was Independence Day) started out taking a tour from a "Beefeater", or Yeomen Warder.  The Beefeaters are these big gruff old army guys who give tours and guard the castle.  Supposedly they are the oldest group of uniformed guards still in existence.  And, they're hilarious (well at least we thought so).  A small snippet of one of the many funny things that our tourguide, Dave said: 

•"Do we have any Americans here?  Apart from today being  Independence Day, let me remind you that if you'd paid your taxes, all this history could have been yours."

Me and Paige and Yeomen Warders:

After the tour we walked around and saw of course, The Crown Jewels, as well as a bunch of armor and weapons (that I'm pretty sure my brothers would have appreciated a lot more than I did).

So even though I was sad I didn't get to join in the family tradition of watching fireworks on Coronado Island on the 4th of July, at least I got to do something cool instead :)

One of my very very favorite parts of this trip so far is the people here.  Here as in, not the English people, but the people in my group.  Everyone here is SO nice and SO friendly and I just want to be best friends with everyone.  It has been so much fun getting to know everyone, and we all feel like we know each other so well already, and we're only a week and a half in.  Yay!