Germany - Logos Hope - days 1 and 2

So the first of the month through the 10th, I traveled around our wonderful earth on a global missions trip through Venture Christian Church. I 'd like to thank my travel partners for making this trip a real joy and I'd really like to thank those that gave to support my way. What a blessing you poured out covering all of my expenses. Thank you so much!

My trip started off with saying good bye to my lovely family. It was so nice of them to let me go (and my Sara did just fine without me - thank you to those that came over or called to keep her mind occupied)

After the wonderful trip through security, we waited on the tarmac in SFO for almost 2 hours. Finally taking off at 10 min. to 2pm (instead of 12:30pm), had a very uneventful flight of watching movies and reading "Into the Wild". Landing in Heathrow, we again waited another 20min before even getting to the gate. At this time we had used up our buffer for my next flight and ran to the gate (Heathrow is not a nice airport, busy and full of mazes). We missed our flight time by 2 minutes and they would not let us board. Soooooo, the next flight is at 3pm (its 9am). What to do with 6hours. Well...we did not want to sit around the airport and so we got our passports stamped (#2 for me) and off into downtown London via the underground railway. Such fun. ("Mind the Gap") Stuffed with people, this truly was an adventure. We had a 45min rail trip to Piccadilly circus.

Then we ran around the area until we saw something of interest. This pillar I had seen on the amazing race TV show so we headed this direction.
At the end of this street is S. James park, which at one end has the Horse Guard Palace.

We saw the changing of the horse guards.

We practically ran everywhere. And since I had not slept on the plane it was tough. Walking the same way as everyone else does get you somewhere some times. We saw Big Ben (from a distance)

But at the other end of St. James Park - Its Buckingham Palace!

Who knew. (See I was there, these are not just pics from Wikipedia)

Well all the people that were there knew, just us"Travelers with no guide book".
Of course The Victoria Memorial Fountain is there also.

To end our day in England, we had lunch at an English tea house and then road the underground back to the airport. We caught the next plane without issue and flew to Hamburg. No we were not done traveling yet. After my travel partner lost his luggage in Hamburg (didn't make the flight) we had an 1.25 hour bus ride North to Kiel, Germany. Tired but very excited, we found the ship and our rooms and hit the hay. That was just the start.