The end of our amazing vacation

Last Wednesday, we visited the Bank of England museum (lots of old currency and videos about inflation) then took the tube out to Stratford. We had tickets to see an Olympic qualifying event at the aquatic center. This is a building always featured in pictures advertising the Olympics. It's beautiful.

The architect is Zaha Hadid. Her picture was featured at the national Portrait Gallery. She's Iraqi born but moved to England for graduate school -- She studied with Rem Koolhas who designed the Seattle Public Library central building among many other buildings. The Olympic Stadium is next door. To get there, we went through the largest shopping mall in Europe. It's basically behind the mall. Then we spent a long time going through security. The event was fun to watch but I cannot imagine navigating the crowds that will be there during the actual Olympics.

On Thursday, we traveled to York. It's a very old city. It became York in 1212 but was around long before that. It's filled with medieval buildings and surrounded by old, old walls some even built by the Romans. We toured a Viking museum. In the 70's someone discovered some Viking artifacts by accident. When archeologists started to dig, they found the remains of a relatively large and prosperous Viking village. They know details such as the color of the clothes the people wore. They recreated the village and we went on a little gondola ride through it. York has lots of tiny pedestrian-only streets so it was fun to wander around. Their cathedral is incredible but like so many churches here they charge quite a bit of money to tour the church. We were content to hang out in the entry.

We toured the remains of a 13th century castle built by Henry III... It had a great view. Thursday we had pretty bad weather -- lots of rain. We ran back to the hotel after the castle but were soaked. Friday we headed to Liverpool. Most of what we saw was new.. old docks rebuilt for tourists. We saw the Beatles museum (privately owned.. very fun .. lots of memorabilia), the maritime museum (the Titanic was built in Liverpool. It sunk 100 years ago this month so there was a big Titanic exhibit). We also got to tour a little bit of the Tate museum there (nice kid area.. a floor of interesting sculpture -- such as that rather odd Jeff Koons work of the three basketballs). We went on a ferris wheel ride for a nice view of the city. It's a very industrial place We returned to London on Saturday.. had down time with the kids then the adults went out to a restaurant specializing in a British cuisine ( I had a pot pie ). Today, it was sunny most of the day. We visited the lovely Holland Park. The playground equipment here is so cool -- trampolines, climbing ropes, swinging ropes, hills, ziplines.. it's cool. The kids had a blast. We are now preparing to leave tomorrow. We don't really want to go. It's been so fun.