Tower of London Surprises!

 There is a show we’ve been binge watching called “Inside the Tower of London” that got us fired up to go see the iconic landmark. I think it’s on it’s 4th or 5th season, and it’s really well done. Anyhow, we set aside today for our visit, and the weather couldn’t have been more beautiful. 

Along with being a palace, a prison, a records office, an armory and barracks for troops, the Tower of London was also once a zoo. There were these cool wire statues placed around the grounds to represent the types of animals that used to live there. I only took pictures of the monkeys for some reason. Probably because I just love taking pictures of monkeys!

I’ve been to the Tower of London years ago, but the circumstances were such that I don’t remember much.  Our visit started rather slow and typical. We beelined to the see the Crown Jewels before it got too crowded and were in awe with the obscene amount of wealth concentrated in one place. Sadly, there are no photos allowed in the area where the jewels are, so you’ll just have to use your imagination on this one.

 

The Beefeaters give tours that start every half hour and we learned about all of the Tower’s gory history. We both found it kind of strange at how nonchalant the Yeomans were as they described the murders, beheadings, and backstabbing political intrigue that occurred within the walls. Like it’s totally normal to marry someone and then execute her 3 years later, then marry someone else 10 days after the execution, marry a teenager, behead the teenager…etc etc. 

 

One of the highlights was the White Tower which had a pretty extensive museum inside that mostly involved armor and weapons. 

 

Inside one of the rooms there was some filming going on and we stopped to listen what was happening. A guy was talking about this crown that was going to be used at the Queens 50th Jubilee in 2 weeks and giving an elaborate description about it. 

The guy doing the explaining was clearly miked up and doing the presentation for the cameras but the other visitors were just kind of uninterested and avoiding him. So Helmut and I stepped up and gave the guy some interaction for the camera…giving the photog adequate opportunity for cutaways and asking the right questions so he could explain it without sounding awkward. 

Afterwards we were approached by a girl who asked for our information and permission to use our images on tv . Turns out, they were filming for “Inside the Tower of London!”  We were stoked! Here we were binging on this show, and now we might be in an episode? SWEET! I just wish I had done my hair or something that morning…I looked pretty wretched. The girl said to look out for it sometime in September. I didn’t get an upclose picture of the crown, but went back and quickly snapped a pic of the film crew.

We were just about to wrap up our visit when we decided to stop and talk with one of the Yeoman Guards. We chatted with him for about 20 minutes and got all kinds of interesting info. 

His name was Shaun (spelled the proper way he says), and we talked about his travels, his family, his life at the Tower, and we gave him our email so he could hit us up for info when he decides to travel to Hawaii. He was super interesting, and our conversation with him was one of the highlights of our time there. 

At Shaun’s suggestion, we went over to the Chapel where a bunch of people are buried (even those that were executed).

 What we found there was shocking!

 Helmut noticed that one of the monuments to the dead was for a guy named John Holland.

 To understand why this is shocking, let me back up for a minute and give you a little background.

A few weeks before we left for our trip, I was doing some genealogy research and discovered that through my mother’s grandmother, I had ancestors who were English. I traced her line all the way back to a place near Manchester called Upholland. Those ancestors were the Hollands of Upholland and I was able to trace back to Ulfe de Holland who was my great great great….too many greats to even say, like over 40 or something. Either way, it was a direct line through my great grandmother. At the time, I was also excited to find that that these were noblemen and there was a fair amount of history surrounding these people…including some of the Hollands who were founding members of The Order of the Garter, which was apparently a pretty big deal. During this search, Helmut and I also discovered that we had a common ancestor by the name of Thurston Holland (37 generations ago). I spent a lot of hours trying to find a museum or something that we could visit near Manchester that might mention these people who we were both apparently related to, but to no avail. 

So back to John Holland…

We asked the Yeoman Guard at the chapel what he knew about this John Holland and he went into this whole explanation about him being in the Order of the Garter (It was a Knights Templar thing and there were apparently only like 23 of these guys) and further explained some history about him that I recognized from my genealogy research!  This was one of our ancestors! I can better figure out the relation when I get back home, but this was very exciting! And we found him buried in the Tower of London of all places….who would’ve thunk?

First full day in London: theatre-palooza!

 It was that weird time when you are experiencing the high of being in a new place but the jet lag hasn’t quite kicked in, and we were grabbing the bull by the horns. We started the day by doing down to TKTS in Leicester Square to see if they had any discount tickets left for the day, and picked up matinee seats for “Come From Away” and evening seats for “Life of Pi.” 

We then hopped on the Tube to go check out the Sir John Soane Museum. 

The Soane Museum was a recommendation from a friend who lives in town and it’s open to the public for free. It was pretty cool. Sir John Soane was an architect and a collector of artifacts whose house is now a museum. 

The artifacts were fascinating, but I think the whole trip there was worth seeing the sarcophagus of Egyptian pharaoh Seti I. Not sure how Soane acquired it, but whatever…there it was!

The Soane Museum didn’t take long, so after about 45 minutes we were headed back towards the Phoenix Theatre for our matinee of “Come From Away”.

“Come From Away” is a musical about the 7000 plane passengers who were diverted to the small Newfoundland town of Gander on 9/11. It was really good, and was particularly impactful for me because I was in London on 9/11 having just landed for a 3 week backpacking trip. Many of the themes in the show were identical to my experience of being in strange place during those days. The confusion, the worry for my family and my country, the sympathy, the suspicion, the moment of silence, and the feeling that something had changed when I got back home. The writers totally nailed the aura of the times.

We wandered around a bit to kill time between shows and stumbled upon Trafalgar Square and Chinatown. 

Trafalgar Square was massive and crowded and full of statues of famous Brits who obviously did something amazing to warrant the caliber of their monuments. From one spot in the Square, we could see Big Ben, the London Eye, The Admirality Arch and the National Museum all from the same spot. We felt like were standing in a London travel brochure decoupage.

We headed back towards the Wyndham’s Theatre for our second show, and ducked into Chinatown for a sec to get an ice cream cone. 

The amount of people walking down the street was so massive, I had to stop someone to ask if there was something special going on, or if it was always this crowded. She assured me that London was always like this on a Saturday evening. 

We had great seats to Life of Pi.

 Of the two shows we saw that day, this one was our favorite. The puppetry and flow of the set changes was just amazing! I’m glad we were able to see this on the West End because it doesn’t seem like the kind of play that can be done just anywhere. 

 ~Margarite

French Polynesia

Because Covid is still making most travel difficult, we decided to take this opportunity to visit French Polynesia by catamaran. It’s the perfect way to travel during a pandemic because we had minimal contact with other people. 

In our opinion, this is the only way to see these islands. Watch our video and you’ll quickly see why. Also, we swam with sharks!

We used Dream Yacht Charters and knew all the other people on the boat.