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The Changing of the Guard.
The incoming guards...
... and the outgoing guards. They leave the palace from the rear and
parade around
to the front before marching off to the barracks.
The actual changeover ceremony takes place behind locked gates inside the
big fence
along the front of the palace, so unless you're there very early
(look at the crowd in the above pic) you're not going to see much !
I love the "pomp and ceremony" of it all, but a female member of
an American tour group
standing beside us commented quite loudly... "Well, that was highly
over-rated" !
More guards were approaching from the direction of Clarence House as we
walked back
up the Mall.
Maggi
and myself in our raincoats, courtesy of the Big Bus tour.
There had been light showers again while we were watching
the changing of the guard, so when we boarded the bus again
(tickets are good for 24 hours so we still had about an hour left)
the seats up top were wet. Raincoats are supplied, so... why not... ??!!
The building across the road behind us is Australia
House,
where we had to go for interviews, medicals etc. before migrating to Oz.
Maggi desperately
wanted to find The
Temple Church of DaVinci Code fame.
We knew it was "here somewhere" but our map was less than
comprehensive,
so after a few false starts, we found ourselves in a "back
alley" where we asked
a vendor in a small kiosk. In his broken English, he waved us
"through that gateway
and then through the other gateway", and there it was, in all its
splendour !
A notice on the door
told us that on Fridays between 1 and 2pm
it's closed to the general public while
a
talk on the DaVinci Code takes place here.
We were there at 1.10pm on a Friday !
We didn't want to waste an hour hanging around,
although it would have been interesting to see it
from the inside.
We'd made
arrangements to meet with one of Bill's business associates and his wife
for dinner that evening, and we still wanted to stop and have a look at
Wimbledon
on the way back to Leatherhead, so we were off back to the station.
That Krispy Kreme outlet that opened ten minutes from us in June is STILL
generating
queues a mile long just about 24 hours a day, (it's the first one in
Victoria)
so when we noticed the one
at
Waterloo
Station, we didn't resist temptation.
This pic is actually a composite of three individual photos !
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