Europe Adventure: Day Thirteen, Part three- London, King's Cross, British Library, Hamley's, and more

After leaving the Globe Theater we began walking toward the Millennium Bridge. 

If you have watched the Harry Potter movies you will recognize this bridge as the one the death eaters swirl around and destroy. 

It is a very cool looking bridge. 

As we walked up onto the bridge, we saw this cool guy. 

Walking across the bridge...

with St. Paul's in the distance. 

We didn't go into St. Paul's Cathedral but we walked by it to get to our tube station. 

A lot of the tube stations go down really far. And these escalators are steep.

Here comes our train...

We rode the train to King's Cross station. 

Then we went to find Platform Nine and Three Quarters. 

We decided not to get in line to get a picture with the trolley since we already did that at the Harry Potter studio tour. 

And this line was LONG.

But we did go into the shop. It was a fantastic shop but so crowded it was hard to move around. I had promised to get Maddy a Hedwig stuffed animal and had not found one at the studios and was able to get one in this shop! I also got Abi a Hermione wand pen that came with a bookmark. 

They used King's Cross in the movies but the outside of it was not King's Cross station. King's Cross is actually quite modern looking and they wanted the outside to look more magical or old fashioned so they used St. Pancras station across the road for the exterior shots. 

We went out of the station to go for a little walk...

and ;while we were walking toward St. Pancras station this group of people all of a sudden ran into the square and began performing. Yay! A flash mob. It was very cool. 

St. Pancras was a beautiful station. 

We walked right by on our way to our next destination- The British Library.

The British Library is free and very cool to visit. 

We went into the treasures exhibit which was amazing. I couldn't take pictures unfortunately but we saw so many cool things. Among them, the Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible of 1455, Leonardo Da Vinci's notebook, the handwritten Handel's Messiah, the original manuscript of Beowulf, and so many more things. I wish I would have written down everything we saw in there. It was amazing. 

I found this little video on YouTube by Rick Steves: 

After leaving the library we walked down the beautiful roads of London....

Next we were visiting Hamley's toy store. 

I promised the girls that I would go in there and pick some toys for them. 

Unfortunately there wasn't much in there that we couldn't get at home that I knew they would love but I did get a few things. And my mom got them some things too. 

It was a huge toy store. 

toys I got them: 

toys my mom got them: 

We then took the tube back to Notting Hill Gate where we were going to go to a pub for dinner. 

But every pub had a line out the door and hours wait time. 

This was really disappointing but we just kept walking to our hotel to see if we could find anything. 

We dropped our things off at our hotel and then went back out to visit some nearby shops and ended up just getting Mcdonalds again. My mom wanted ice cream for Sunday dessert and we figured that would be the best place to find it. But then they were out of ice cream. What? Haha. 

We took our food back to our room and watched some more Pride and Prejudice while we ate. 

We were very tired and it was nice to be able to relax and then go to bed!