An Audience with the Queen

The first nice weekend of the summer (we are told by the locals) and we are off to a great start. Early Saturday morning we headed to Buckingham Palace to finally get Ryan his official visit with the Queen.

Unfortunately once again he was told the Queen had just left, and wouldn't be back until poor Ryan's naptime.



So in order to cheer our little cheeky monkey up we decided to take a tour of the state rooms inside of Buckingham Palace. They would not let us take any pictures of the inside or I would have blown all 2 gigs of my camera's memory card. Wow. Everything inside is bronze, or gold, or silver. The furniture is collected from long dead kings named Louis and Henry. The wallpaper is even made of silk. There are Rembrandts and other famous paintings everywhere and there is even a table owned by Napoleon Bonaparte which took 6 years to build.

We did an audio tour and wore headsets that told you all about every aspect of the palace from its conception as the Buckingham House to it's change from a quaint mansion into the palace it is today. One interesting fact I remember is that during "The Blitz" of WWII the Queen and her husband refused to leave the palace and abandon her people. The palace was bombed 9 times over the course of the war.

The people here love the Queen and it's easy to see why. The audio tour was fun and I'm sure Jessi enjoyed the half she got to hear before Ryan ripped the headset off her ears and entangled himself in it. After seeing the sights on the inside we were escorted out the back to see the garden area and we were invited to take pictures of the back of the palace.



This picture doesn't do it justice but you can get the general idea of what it looks like. We then took a cute family picture.



You can see Ryan telling his mummy about his opinion of the queen. He might be a bit bitter.