Day 6, Saturday,  in London-our last full day of vacation. We decided to spend the day visiting all the big museums. They all have free admission, which was good since we used up our London Pass. Most of the museums are located near Buckingham palace, so we thought we'd swing by and watch the changing of the guards before visiting the Natural History Museum.

Turns out, the Second Saturday in June is set aside to celebrate the Queen's Birthday. We did not know what to expect at the palace, but we thought we'd get an early start. After our train and subway ride, we arrived near Westminster Abbey. We thought we'd run in for a quick visit since none of us has seen the inside of the beautiful church. Still have not seen the inside-it was closed for a private event planned for the Royals.

So we made our way to the front of Buckingham palace. We discovered quite a crowd had gathered, along with tv cameras and reporters. We did not realize that the Royal family takes a carriage ride down the Mall to the Wellington Barracks, a nearby armory where the Queen inspects the Troops, AKA Trooping the Colours, and then heads back to the palace. So we were caught up in the parade crowds. Scott tried climbing on a fence pole to see over the people, but a Bobbie quickly asked him to get down. So we had to watch the parade from the back of the crowd and just glimpsed the top of the Royal family heads-mostly of the Queen's hat. Afterwards, as the crowd dispersed, we walked over to the History museum.

It is an incredibly beautiful and massive building with lots of incredibly old artifacts including dinosaurs, stuffed animals and birds, some brought back by Charles Darwin himself. We then planned on visiting the Science museum, however, after checking out my tour book, Tom thought the British museum would be a bit more fascinating. Turns out he was right! The British Museum was full of amazing mummies and artifacts. And when we left the Science museum, we were treated to an aerial display over London in honor of the Queen's Birthday! Guess we missed the entire family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, but we really could not have seen much of anything with all the crowds. Instead we enjoyed watching the festivities on the BBC tv broadcast that evening when we got back to the hotel.

We stopped into another pub for a late lunch, and on our way back to the hotel, we slipped into the National Portrait Gallery to catch some of the paintings of quite a number of very famous Brits like Shakespeare, Handel, Queen Victoria, Beatrix Potter, Prince Harry and Prince William, Queen Elizabeth and  celebs like Amy Winehouse as well as  our very own George Washington. We really enjoyed our day of touring the museums, but it makes for a rough visit since none of the buildings are air conditioned and they are quite large and full of lots of stairs.

We found our way back to our vacation starting point at Trafalgar Square, but we did not stay long. A very large crowd of demonstrators was gathering-some to protest eating meat and others for the release of some political prisoner. And the crowd was getting ugly as they took over one of the double decker tour buses. That was our cue to head back to the hotel. And also watch the protest on tv.  We did take one last walk through Kingston along the river to say goodbye to the swans before stopping in a local restaurant for a late dinner. We considered heading to the movie theater to catch the opening in London of Jurassic World, but we were all a bit to worn out from our long day of hiking through the museums.

On Sunday it was time to pack up and head home. Tom decided we would take the train to Heathrow airport(not again), but he chose a different route based on some phone app. This time we were headed all the way to Paddington station, quite a bit north of Heathrow. It did not make a whole lot of sense to me-I was navigating as the crow flies-a more direct path on trains and subways just like our arrival route. But we packed up and headed to

Paddington station, running for our train. We boarded an incredibly fancy train, not like the basic commuter trains we were used to riding and discovered that our Oyster pass did not work on this train. This was a special airport commuter train. You had to buy separate tickets for this train and each ran around 40.00 American dollars-one way, per ticket. Tom's app showed him the fastest way to the airport, but not the cheapest. We quickly grabbed our suitcases and hopped off. Tom broke down and decided to call for an Uber ride. We located our ride in about 20 mins outside the train station and had quite an enjoyable, if not exciting ride through the streets of London to Heathrow airport. And a whole lot cheaper for all 4 of us. We managed to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare before our flight, so we opted for lunch at Gordon Ramsey's restaurant inside the terminal as well as spending some time souvenir shopping.

We had another wonderful flight home and since this was during the day, we spent a lot more time watching movies and playing video games. I managed to catch up with 3 oscar winning/nominated films. And again, British airways fed us way too much food.

So we arrived back in Baltimore early in the evening and we even had time to pick up Cookie from our neighbors before heading to bed. We all agreed that our trip to London was quite a highlight for our family vacations and we would all love to go back!