Thames Cruising

I want to tell you that yesterday was well planned in advance, and that we looked at the weather forecast and thought to ourselves - hey, it is supposed to be sunny on Sunday. What should we do that will be fun for the whole family? And came up with the idea of a Thames cruise. But what really happened was that I woke up yesterday morning fully intending to bitch the day away. It might have had something to do with the fact that I went back to the Weight Watchers & exercise regime I so gladly abandoned a few months ago in favour of constant cake eating and excuse telling.
Hidai, who dragged me out of bed after he got tired of hearing me complaining about the worthlessness of my life and the cruelness of the world (I honestly don't know why he got tired of it, I am a very good complainer. It's one of my stronger qualities) decided that leaving the house was in order, and because we looked outside and saw that it was, indeed, a glorious day and because we've been trying to go with the whole "live life to the fullest" thing we immediately thought about spending the day in Paris. Since 700 pounds in train tickets seemed a bit on the extreme side, we settled on crossing another one of those London touristy things off our list (I love being a tourist in London. Sometimes I think I like it better than living in London, but that is for a different post) and so we booked tickets on the CityCruise circular cruise - they did promise 45 monuments in 45 minutes, and it costs only 23 pounds for 4 people, so looked like the best choice for us. After all - Yon can't see most of the monuments and Hidai doesn't like being on water.
To counter the fact that Yon won't see or care about any of the monuments we offered he dress up as a pirate. Obviously we meant the hat. Obviously he meant the whole ensemble. And so we found ourselves rushing through two tubes and the tower of London with Jack Sparrow and his slightly embarrassed older brother, much to the delight of everyone who saw us.

We managed to get to the docks on time, which for some reason is always really difficult on weekends, and found a spot at the front of the boat which was lucky because the cabin provided some shade for Yon, at least for part of the way. Pirates hats, though dashing, are not really good for shade-creating. At least I remembered to put enough suncream on them to make sure they return home in the same condition they left, and not turn into a tomato.
We have enough tomatoes at home right now with the whole Weight-Watchers thing.
They did enjoy it, The crew gave a very funny commentary and the visibility was great so I managed to take what I thought of as a few pictures of everything. When I got home I found out it was about 270 photos, but that could still be counted as "a few" right?

And we even got a family one!

Yon was interested when we passed other boats

Look how skinny I look :)

The boat did go all the way to Greenwich but the boys had enough just going from Tower Pier to Westminster and back, and also we might have been a bit hungry and Ron still had homework at home to get back to (oh, the joy of learning not to postpone things so you could play a little bit more of xBox), but since the day had been going on so well we decided on Pret for lunch (how sensible and diet friendly of us) and a bus ride to St. Paul, which was obviously mostly closed because it was Sunday after all, but we still got to see the entrance hall and realise that as much as the kids have grown and are easier to travel with, they are still not ready for churches.
You have to now your limits I guess.

In Prêt 

It was a great day out, and though I have to say I usually prefer London grey and cloudy (that's the way it should be in my mind) from the river there is nothing like a bit of sunshine (and half a brownie at Pret) to elevate a person's mood.