Moon Over Canary Wharf

A full moon last night, glowing above the lights of Canary Wharf and the new London Shard, as seen from my balcony.

A Day by the River

My friend Spicegirl is in town from Grenada in the Caribbean, so we arranged to meet up on the Southbank and make a day of doing things by the Thames. The day started off chilly and grey — the kind of London day we’re all pretty much used to over here…

…and I headed over Hungerford Foot Bridge…

…passing by the steel drum player…

…the fun fair…

…and ice cream van, waiting for the weather to change…

…the Japanese art students sketching…

…Charlie Chaplin…

…to the London Eye, www.londoneye.com , where we’d arranged to meet up.

Spicegirl had some tickets, so we queued up and hopped on (literally — the wheel stops for nobody!).

We settled in…

…and admired the view of the brown Thames…

…and the Houses of Parliament (aka the Palace of Westminster), http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/.

By the time we’d done our full circle, the weather had cleared and we decided to hop on the river bus to Greenwich.

A big thumbs up for the river bus, a cheap and cheerful way to see all the sights along the Thames…

We stopped by the Cutty Sark, of course, built in 1869 and one of the last tea clippers, http://www.rmg.co.uk/cuttysark/…

…and I admired the glass dome by the pier…

…then we walked along the riverside path, past the Old Royal Naval College,  www.omc.org ,designed by Christopher Wren in the 1600s, and now a popular location for movies (Skyfall, Les Miserables…)

…to the Trafalgar Tavern, www.travalgartavern.co.uk , a fixture on the Thames since 1837, and frequented in the 19th century by prime ministers and writers like Charles Dickens.

We grabbed a table by the window, where we had a view of the Millennium Dome…

…and ordered the fish cakes, which looked lovely but were rather on the bready side and skimpy with the hollandaise sauce (we asked for more — cheeky us).

Then it was back on the river bus to London Bridge, where the new Shard gleamed in the sunlight (and which six intrepid Greenpeace women had scaled the day before to protest petroleum development in the delicate ecosystem of the Arctic) http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/07/11/london-shard-greenpeace-activists.html…

…and onto our respective trains home.