7.3 miles

Lots of walking in London today! From our hotel near Paddington station, through Hyde Park to Buckingham Palace, all round the palace (spectacular but no photos allowed) then on down to cross the Thames river and ride the London Eye (less than half hour queuing, and great photos!), after a late good chinese lunch, back over the Thames and through Trafalgar Square and Picadilly Circus, up Regent Street and along Oxford Street, an unplanned diversion up Edgware Road, and finally back to our hotel! Google Maps says 7.3 miles, and add a bit for the Palace …
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Tired now (we’re not used to that much walking, it’s all cars in USA!)

Wembley stadium

A much tougher Olympics day today! Traffic once again was not an issue, with easy travel M23/M25/M40, a little slow getting to the end of the A40, but fine till we got close to the Wembley stadium – at which time all hell joined us! Roads closed everywhere, preventing every attempt by TomTom to get us to our booked parking. Poor directions from Olympic staff didn’t improve things; we finally gave up and just paid again to park where we happened to be.
But then we were at the Wembley stadium, surely now all would be fine … Sadly, a huge and unrealized US Olympic ticket seller screw-up left us separated and lost! They’d sold us two tickets in totally different parts of the stadium; I went through then couldn’t find Margaret anywhere – she had both phones because of security searches … after much stress I happened to see her still outside the turnstiles and the story revealed itself.

The Olympic staff were no help – not able to help perhaps; a suggestion to join an hour plus long queue which likely would have meant us missing the game. Eventually we were forced to go through separate sections, but happily a few empty seats meant we could get back together within the first half hour of the game. The game itself, between South Korea and Gabon, had some exciting moments but ended with no score – oh well!