The first thing we had to do was top up the Oyster Cards for the bus, which is the cheapest way to get around at a maximum fare of £4.50 a day with that done it was time to catch the bus from just outside the station for the 5-minute ride to Blackfriars Road on the 381. From there it was only a short walk around the side of the Tate Modern to get on the banks of the Thames.
One thing that makes us laugh is that the water is always shown as blue, but the Thames is definitely not. Although it was cloudy today it wasn't cold, along the river is not the place to be on a cold day. A short walk brought us to the Millennium Bridge, which was made famous when it first opened by wobbling from side to side with the number of people on it so was closed to the public almost straight away, you can still feel it bouncing up and down now as you walk across it, unfortunately they had fencing on there so you couldn't get any good photos across it. After crossing the bridge it brings you out by Saint Paul's Cathedral and with a MacDonald's just down the road so as it was now 11.30 we decided to have something to eat.
Just across the road from here was the bus stop so we caught the number 4 for a 10-minute ride to the Museum of London.
This is an odd place to get into as it's surrounded on 3 sides by roads plus you have to be on an upper level to get in, the first elevator we tried didn't work so had to go and find another one further up.
This museum traces the history of London over a few thousand years up the present day with some excellent displays and is laid out very well.
After spending about an hour and a half in there we caught the 100 bus from outside to the Liberty Bounds pub about 20 minutes away, like most pubs in central London is was packed but managed to get a seat after a while. As far as prices go, it wasn't too expensive at £5 for 2 drinks.
We only stayed in here for about an hour, then took a short walk to Tower Bridge, which is always going to be super busy, but at least I managed to get one good photo while crossing it. The weather today had been mostly dense cloud until now, but the sun had started to make some holes in it at 4 o'clock, but that didn't leave us much time to take pictures, the light is much better towards the end of the day anyway.
By the time we had crossed the bridge it was around 4.30 so headed into the Pommelers Rest for a quick drink, there seemed to be some sort of team building exercise going on in here with what I could only describe as the sort of people that are holiday reps for some piss up party place in Spain, they were loud and they were annoying.
It was only a short walk to the bus stop for the 188 that would take us back towards Waterloo station, I had planned on 2 or 3 ways to get back and this looked the best as the transit app shows how bad the traffic is along the route so off we went for the bus.
Unfortunately the bus didn't make it to where it was going because they decided to cut the route short, so kicked everyone off 2 stops before Waterloo Station, this seems to happen a lot in London on the buses and is something that really gets on people's tits, anyhow, this turned out to be better for us as it gave us the opportunity to go to Tesco and get some booze for the train journey back, there is a Sainsbury's closer but it's twice the price with obnoxious staff.
We were back the station about 17:50 and the train was due to leave at 18:09 which is a bit closer than I would like to call it, but that was my fault for staying in the pub too long.
The train left on time and we were back home by 8.20 having had a really good day without spending a fortune.
