Day 8 | National Gallery and Buckingham Palace

London, Day 8—Today we ate at a Mexican restaurant that our friend used to manage, Chaquitos. It was delicious and so fun to have Mexican food...my favorite! We did have to pay for a very small plate of chips and salsa...trying not to be bitter about that. Ha!

Instead of going to Buckingham Palace, we decided to head to the National Gallery since our time was running out before it closed. The National Gallery was founded in 1824 and has a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid 13th-century to 1900. (Info from Wikipedia) We used a scavenger hunt book we found for the girls to have certain things to look for. This book has been a great resource for them and me to learn some of the basics about some of the places we visit.

Looking at paintings is one of my favorite things to do in museums. It’s really hard to do with kids, so I’m not getting to read about them as much as I would like. But this trip, that desire is being replaced with talking about some of the paintings with the kids. There are many paintings of scenes from the Bible that we’ve been able to talk about along with some of the styles and techniques different artists use. It’s fun to be able to teach our kids and learn more as we go.

We stepped outside the National Gallery into Trafalgar Square, where we read our scavenger hunt book about some of the statues there.

Our last stop on this day was Buckingham Palace. This is a working Palace so the inside is only open at certain times of the year (unless you pay for and reserve special small group tickets). Seeing the outside was pretty cool though! We barely saw three of the guards walking toward the end if the building...I’m guessing they were done for the day because we didn’t see them again.

Another day in London is in the books!