London 1/1/19

Today was parade day!  We took the tube to Piccadilly Circus and then walked down to the grandstands.  What an ingenious idea - the grandstands were truck trailers which opened up and were complete with fairly comfortable plastic seats with an awning!  We got to watch the parade in style!

Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of the Fitch band as I was taking video of them and don't know how to upload a video onto the blog.  Dave took stills of the band on the cell phone, but again I don't know how to upload from the phone to the blog - something else to learn for next time.  The band, however did an awesome job - made us proud!

The parade was quite interesting.  There were floats for all of London's boroughs and John and Maura Casey who were sitting in front of us got to judge the floats.  The winner receives 10,000 pounds to give to their favorite charity.  The floats were quite interesting and sometimes elaborate.

But there were other oddities, such as the Donkey Breeders association and other groups that danced their way down the parade route.

There was even a group that walked the 2.2 mile route on stilts:

The members of the Fitch chorus and orchestra were in charge of holding the London phone box balloon:

We had a marvelous time.  We fought our way  through the crowdsto the nearest tube station and finally got back to the hotel close to 4PM.  We had a bite of "linner" (combination of lunch and dinner) and went back to our room to warm up.  My ears and fingers were quite chilled even though they were protected.  We were going to go out for a walk, but ended up staying in as it took quite a while to shake the chill.

Tomorrow we will go to Hampton Court with Amy's family.  The groups are going on the Harry Potter walk and the Rock and Roll walk.