My Day at the Tower...

 Hello from the other red-headed blogger, Ashley!  

The Tower of London is truly magnificent. It still has inscriptions from former prisoners on the walls!  Sad & tragic, but interesting too,  to think of people desperately carving names and dates and sometimes pictures, into cold stone as they waited for imminent death, and it was often a horrific one, assuming they didnt die first from rats, disease, and starvation.  Interesting that people were executed in an attempt to punish first, but in some cases, to wipe them from public memory, and yet these were some of the very people kept alive in history because they "left their mark," they carved their names & because they did, we want to know their story, or at least, I certainly do (and so does my mom...besides our red hair and everybody thinking we look like each other, we're both kinda history geeks too!)  It would have been easier to not bother with carving into stone, but for the people who did it, I have to wonder about what compelled them; was it done in rebellion? A small, bold act of disobedience, the only resistance afforded them?  It's not like they were equipped with real tools, can you imagine how hard it must have been to do it?!  And they were cold & hungry & seemingly stripped of everything, but they still had something that made them do it....  Can you tell my mother's been talking my ear off?!  Do I sound like her too?  You know, there's no just "taking a vacation" with her!  "Not when there's so much to learn!" she retorts, (yes, retorts, she doesn't just "say" or "respond," she retorts! you know this, right?) and I roll my eyes and on it goes, but truth be told, she knows that I'm mostly thankful for it.  And I am.

My favorite part of the day was seeing the Crown Jewels. They are dazzling and beautiful! One of the diamonds is 530 carats!  Really!  We couldn't take any pictures of the jewels sadly. It's too late now  to tell you about the London Eye, which we did the same day as the Tower, and the Globe Theater,  which we did today (and both were SO SOgreat!!) but there is more to tell tomorrow!   Hopefully Mom will post more pictures from the Tower to go with this one.  Goodnight from London!