A Serendipitous Find (Fri July 6)

Today we started out with a walking tour of the Olympic Village.  It was rainy and overcast and you couldn't get very close due to ongoing construction and very strict security.

Our relatively unenthusiastic crew during the organization of the tour.

Davis and Logan front  and center as we got a tour of East London's Industrial Wasteland
turned Olympic complex.

These large variegated snails living along the old canal
may have been one of the more interesting things we saw!

Portions of the Aquatics Center

The Olympic Viewing Tower (aka "The Orbit")

Olympic Village (in far background) 

Portions of the Stadium and Water Polo Building

The somewhat freakish 2012 Olympic Mascot

The best view of the Olympic Complex was actually from the adjacent shopping center.  You will be proud to know that Westfield shopping centers are in the U.K. and have exactly cloned the U.S. suburban mall experience world-wide.  Same brands, same stores, same fast food.  If you pay by Credit Card, you wouldn't know that you weren't in North America.  And who says we don't make great contributions to Western Civilization?!  

  Davis was excited about his purchase of some new
Lego figures, Olympics 2012 edition.

After finishing our lunch we found that we had strayed outside the range of our one week subway passes.  However, they did entitle us to ride any bus for free so we put on our adventurous face, found one and got on.  About 10 minutes into the route, the dispatcher put our bus "on diversion" and the driver left the appointed route.  He then missed a turn and was lost for a few minutes.  At this point we were fortunate to witness a busload of angry Britons verbally bludgeon the driver--it was better than TV!

Aboard the standard red double decker

 We bailed out at the next available stop, which just happened to be adjacent to Victoria Park.  It was really quite nice and had terrific playgrounds.  The rain stopped, the clouds cleared and we spent a perfect afternoon at this accidental stop.  We finally left after nearly 3 hours, although we all could have stayed longer.  It was one of the highlights of our week.

This was a seriously big slide!

On our way out of the park

We decided to walk the remaining distance to our subway stop from there!   Thanks to Google Maps we found our way and stopped in a neighborhood grocery to buy some dinner.  

We are packed and ready to go.  Tomorrow it's off to Amsterdam via the Eurostar and Thalys bullet trains!