Spending a day at Hyde Park was like spending a day out in the country – well, almost. Hyde Park is one of London’s largest parks. It was the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and is famous for its Speaker’s Corner. The day we were there, someone was on his soap box going on about something but when you’re on a two-week vacation you don’t have time for political and philosophical discourse. In 1976, it looked like a beach not an urban park (although now, a lot of urban parks also look like beaches. Visit my August 31, 2014 Cleveland blog by clicking the travel musings link and see what I mean.)

www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/hyde-park

The London Zoo is the world’s oldest scientific zoo. It opened in London on April 27, 1828 as a center for scientific stud but it didn’t open to the public until 1847.  The London Zoo was one of the biggest zoos I ever saw up to that point in my life. www.zsl.org/zsl-london-zoo