Italy Day 8, Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica, London Day 9, Home Sweet Home

The next day we got up early to visit the Vatican. We booked the earliest entry tickets so we were towards the front of the line. We ate a quick breakfast while we waited to enter:

 

As soon as we got inside we walked straight through the museums without stopping so we could get to the Sistine Chapel. It was great walking quickly through everything because it was NOT crowded at that time:

We found out that they don't open the Sistine Chapel until 15 minutes after they open the museum so we had to wait a few minutes to get inside, but it was worth it. We were some of the only visitors outside of the guards that were in the Sistine Chapel for a good 30 minutes. They don't allow pictures inside the Sistine Chapel so here we are outside waiting to get in:

Daniel wanted to send his girlfriend a postcard so he sent it through the post office inside the Vatican:

After visiting the Sistine Chapel, we backtracked and went back to the beginning of the Vatican museums to look at everything. It was cool to see all the things, but it was so full of people!! Here's some of the cool things we saw--a mummy:

Did I mention there were so many people?! We had to move a long with the crowd because it was so full. It was crazy!!

The map room was one of our favorites to walk through:

I loved seeing the oil lamps:

At the end we walked down the spiral staircase:

After that we walked over to St. Peter's Basilica:

We stopped by to admire Michelangelo's famous La Pieta sculpture of Mary holding Jesus after He was crucified:

We stopped by to visit St. Jerome's altar. Last year Aaron and I visited here and this was the only place we could find to sit down. I was thankful for St. Jerome and so we visited him again so we could sit down again. There are not very many places you can sit down inside the basilica amazingly enough.

St. Peter's Basilica is the largest Catholic Church in the world. The place is HUGE!!! You can see the huge Papal Alter behind us:

St Peter's Basilica allegedly hold the remains of the Apostle St. Peter under the alter. You can kind of see the tomb behind the kids in this picture:

We did have an appointment to climb the 551 stairs up to the dome. We got started before it got even hotter.

I am amazed by the mosaics around the inside of the dome. They are amazing!

The inside of the dome is pretty high up and a few of us are afraid of heights...

You can see how tiny the people look below:

There is a small outside courtyard you can walk around in the middle of the climb:

We then continued on to the upper part of the dome. This is where it gets really narrow and really tilted:

The view of St. Peter's courtyard from the outside of the dome is amazing.

After admiring the view (and trying to catch our breath from the stair climb) we started on our way back down which was just as narrow and crooked as when we were climbing up. Poor Josh really struggled because it was definitely not made for tall people. Here's the spiral staircase to get back down:

It was crazy how crooked the walls were:

Aaron pointed out that there was an SOS button. That climb in that heat was brutal. I can understand why they have an SOS button--haha! I am just glad we didn't need it.

We made it! St. Peter's Basilica was amazing and beautiful. 

After visiting there we stopped by a place to get some lunch. They aren't used to big groups/families so we had to divide our group in order to have a place to sit down. The kids are behind us while Aaron and I were sitting next to another couple. Amazingly enough this Canadian couple actually lived in the area where Aaron served his mission. He loved talking with them for a few minutes:

Lunch came and was good:

We then went back to Rome and walked around looking at a bunch of different things. We also stopped by and got one last round of gelato.

We stopped by Trevi Fountain again:

We then headed back to our AirBnB to pack up. We had to leave the next morning at 3:45am in order to catch our 6:45 am flight to London. When we booked our tickets we ended up having a surprise 24 hour layover in London. That was a cool, unexpected bonus!  Anyway, Aaron scheduled an Uber to get us to the airport since no transit ran that early in the morning--DOH!! We were really tired before our day in London even began. 

We got off the airplane and took a double decker bus to our hotel in London:

After dropping off our luggage we then took the tube into London to go exploring. We didn't get to the city until 11:30 am and hit the ground running:

We started at the Tower of London:

We saw the Crown Jewels. They don't allow pictures inside, but it was cool:

We then joined in a BeefEater tour. We did miss the first 30 minutes of the tour which I am sad about, but the rest of the tour was awesome. I thought we could catch another tour, but we realized too late that the next tour wasn't for at least 2 hours and we didn't want to wait that long. The rest of the tour was cool, though.

This was our Beefeater guide:

The armory was cool to see:

Since we only had one day in London and we wanted to see all the things, we didn't have a whole lot of time to spend at each location. Anyway, after we were done at the Tower of London we walked by Tower Bridge:

We then went over to the British Museum. We got to see the the library:

The Rosetta Stone:

We did do the Rick Steve's tour around the British Museum:

This weird, tiny merman. They think it is a monkey head stitched on to a fish tail:

After seeing what we had time for at the British Museum and it was closing we had to leave. We took a quick selfie outside the front doors and headed to the next thing:

We stopped by Trafalfar Square and stopped inside the Church St. Martin the Fields. When I did my study abroad in London they had these really cool candlelight concerts here. We would go to them on the weekends. It was fun to step inside for a few minutes:

We then walked around Trafalgar Square:

We then headed over to the Houses of Parliament and to see Big Ben:

Stopped by the Winston Churchill statue:

We stopped by Westminster Abbey. We were able to go inside because it was closing as we arrived, unfortunately, but we did get a picture outside of it:

We did ride many double decker buses getting around London. Those drivers are scary, but interesting to watch them drive. 

We did drive by St. Paul's Cathedral, but did not get a picture. We then stopped by to get some fish and chips:

It was cool just walking around the area:

We stopped by Buckingham Palace and walked through St. James Park:

Going up and down the escalators between tube stops was interesting as well:

We wanted to keep going, but all of us hit a wall mentally and physically and decided we needed to head back to the hotel since we had a really long day of travel the next day. We did get in 11.4 miles of walking that day, though. We had to get to the airport at 6:45am the next morning.

After getting through security we grabbed a quick breakfast and got on the plane for our 10 and half hour flight back to Texas. Luckily, there was no one sitting on the aisle in front of us so Josh moved up so Noah could have an aisle seat, too. 

We had a layover in Texas. All of us just crashed. I guess after so many 11-15 mile days with early morning and late evenings you finally hit a wall when you sit down for a minute. I can't sleep like that, but everyone else did while I kept watch.

We finally made it home to Provo and drove home. We made it all the way home by 12:30 am. It was an amazing trip, but took a few days to recover from. Poor Noah had to wake up early the next day to go to school. Anyway, I am thankful we were able to go and spend this time together and experience so many things together.