London Updates

This has been the longest day ever. We arrived at WVHS at 8am EST on Wednesday and left for Atlanta at 11am. We flew to London on 5 airplanes and only had 1 piece of lost luggage which will be returned tomorrow. (Don't worry parents, it was a student whose parents are here with us.) Check in was extremely smooth. We let everyone go out and explore the city in groups before having dinner at the hotel. Below are some pictures I have taken so far. I'm going to try my best to update the page every night, so keep checking back.

Today we started with breakfast in the hotel before heading out on a 4 hour guided bus tour of Central London. We eventually met up at the Tower of London. After the tower we let groups go out once more to explore the town freely. Sorry for the short description, but it's late here and I need to hurry and get this posted to the internet before the cafe closes! Hopefully I can write more tomorrow.

On Saturday we ventured outside of London to visit one of the Queen's official residences: Windsor Castle. This was a gorgeous day, hopefully you can see that in the pictures below. When we returned to central London, everyone was allowed several more hours to travel around the city in their own groups. After meeting back for dinner, we boarded our buses to attend a concert which featured the choir as one of the performing ensembles. The choir performed excellent and was by far one of the best prepared ensembles on the program.

Sunday morning we set off early for a two hour trip out to Stratford-Upon-Avon to visit the birthplace of Shakespeare. After touring the museum and house, everyone had a little over a hour to wonder the beautiful town for lunch. Next we took a short drive down the road to visit Warwick Castle. This castle is beautiful and everyone had a good time running around this medieval structure. After returning to the hotel and having dinner, we attended a New Year's party at the hotel. The party had snacks, a DJ, and two other bands other than WV. It was a great way to celebrate the new year!

Today was the big day. After breakfast we set off for the parade. We had a group picture made before heading over to our holding area for the parade. Since we were the 14th group in the parade, our setup location was directly beside Houses of Parliament, right under Big Ben. The weather was wonderful! Rain and high winds had us worried last night, but the sun was out and it was gorgeous. There were so many people at the parade, and they were so excited to see every group. We had Japanese tourists coming up to our band members asking for pictures of our members with their children. Throughout the parade route, hundreds of thousands of cameras were going off constantly. This ain't no Cleveland Christmas parade! The band played wonderfully and we put smiles on many people's faces. This afternoon we have another free day in the city. Tomorrow we have more free time until the evening, when we will all go to a West End Musical. This will most likely be last update until we get back home, at which point I might add a few more pictures. Hope you have enjoyed following along with our trip. I certainly can't wait to come again.

By the way, if the page layout is really funky looking, I'm sorry. I forgot to copy over some important files and so I'm kind of flying blind with the layout. But at least you're getting some live info and pictures of our trip, right?

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Last updated: 01/01/07.