29th July – Inside Buckingham Palace, The Royal Mews & The Tower of London

We made it to the palace queue around 9:30am as we all needed a bit of a sleep in. It was pretty good timing actually, as people had obviously been queuing for some time, but we got there just as the lines started to head in. About half an hour later, we walked in through the gates into the main entrance of the state rooms and a (you guessed it) huge staircase. Buckingham is even more impressive than Windsor Castle, and it was pretty mind blowing walking around it. Photos do it no justice, and where I would have thought that elaborate guilded carvings on walls, and around doorways and windows would look gaudy, this really didn’t. I think the enormous ceilings made it all just look impressive and powerful – what you would expect of a Palace. Some of the rooms must have been almost three stories tall, with beautiful flocked and rich wallpapers, heavy drapery and the most wonderful ornaments and porcelain I have seen yet.  The first rooms held displays of weaponry, based on medieval ideals that the first thing visitors should see would be how well armed and protected the monarchy was/is. There were swords crisscrossed up the wall – at least a hundred of them in all.

There was a display all about Prince Philip’s as it is his 90^th birthday. There was all sorts of things about him, collected by him, and artwork and photos taken by him. There was even a library card for Cambridge University, looking just like any normal library card, photo, signature, all that sort of stuff. There was a fabulous photo that he took in the Galapagos Islands, of two large iguanas that had climbed onto a rock together. It was taken at the perfect time, as it appeared that one iguana had put his arm around the other one.

There was a Faberge display – intricate Faberge eggs and little ornaments everywhere. The detail was amazing, and we agreed that the present day royals had better taste in their Faberge collection than their predecessors.

We entered the throne room to see the display of Kate’s (headless) dress. It really is a gorgeous gown, very slight and small – and the embroidery on it is stunning. There was a video running on large screens about how the dress was made and how all the lace was individually cut from old lace and resewn onto the gown itself. Her shoes (also covered in lace), a replica bouquet, and her earrings (a wedding gift from her parents) were also on display. It was a bit of a thrill to be standing in the throne room actually – I wouldn’t consider myself a royalist by any means, but there was definitely something about being there. Lush and lavish, regal to the utmost (of course) and very appealing to this Fairy Queen!

Onto another magnificent music room, where all the royal family is baptized as well, and another ‘receiving’ room which was all white. It was just room after room of fabulousness and they have all become a bit of a blur to be honest. We were dazzled by all of it, and would thoroughly recommend as many royal palace tours as you could fit in!

By this time, having walked around 1000 miles in the past two weeks, I decided that my fabulously well worn-in ‘walking’ shoes were not really walking shoes at all. So now I have new walking shoes courtesy of the camping shop opposite the palace. This may not seem exciting enough to actually include in a blog entry, but if you were in my shoes, you would be pretty ecstatic about new shoes too. I love them, and I have told Mark how much I love them at least 10 times every day since.

We found this excellent Lebanese restaurant to have some lunch after our morning at the Palace. Seriously, how good is Lebanese food!!! Jamie decided to head back to the motel after that to try to catch up on some sleep before her trip to Germany and Austria, and so we walked on down to the Royal Mews. You’d think that the mews was more important than the palace with how long it took to get into between the ticket office and the security check. Once inside, we did a quick walk around of all the carriages. We saw the Australian coach, the Irish coach, the Scottish coach, the Canadian coach… We slo saw one of the Rolls Royce Ghosts with its perfectly clear windows and high buff polish. We oohed over the Coronation coach – it really was spectacular, all gold and symbolic statues. We also saw the coach that Kate and William left Westminster in, although the top was up on it and so it looked a little different. Off into the stables, and we saw ‘Dennis’ the horse – he was beautiful, and I think he was named after Margaret Thatcher’s hubby.

Our next stop was the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels. The Tower was interesting, but to me, it seemed badly set up for tourism. There were odd displays indifferent towers, but I think I learnt more about the Towers from Uni than what I did at the site. It’s hard to explain, but it seemed like it was all put together in a hodge podge way, with displays saying things, just because they needed to say something, not because it was interesting or informative. So after about 40 minutes, we decided to head into the Crown Jewels. Oh my God. Are there any other words to describe the crown jewels? We saw crowns and scepters and orbs – all covered in gems of amazing proportions, and lots of purple velvet. We saw Elizabeth II’s coronation crown, along with the scepter which held the star of Africa which is over 500 carats. We saw George VI’s crown which held the Star of Africa II – it was just a little smaller at around 300 carats. I loved Queen Victoria’s little diamond crown, the one you see in all the old pictures of her, the tiny one that sits above a little veil. There was also a large amount of gold serving ware, including another fabulous punch bowl which held over 400 bottles of champagne. They shuffle you past the jewels via a little moving walkway, we went back and forth three times just gazing at all the fabulous things on display.

We were just so incredibly exhausted, it had been a few very big days to say the least, and so we took a quick look at London Bridge (which is painted bright blue and I reckon it would glow at night) and headed on back to the motel. We had one final dinner with Jamie before she headed off on her Germany/Austria adventure, and just collapsed into bed.

Our piccies for this one are here!