Riding the London Eye

Happy May Day to my Brits!  (We have the first Monday in May off as a holiday in the U.K.) .  Today I am spending all day flying back from my trip to Bali,  (Singapore to Doha and then Doha to London), but tonight I will be sleeping in my own bed so I thought it was only fighting to share a post about one of my favorite things to do in my new hometown. 

One of my fundamental travel rules is to always try and stay in the heart of town, especially when exploring a new city. It cuts down on travel time and gives you a true sense of wherever you are visiting and this is something I definitely got from my parents because I remember my first visit to London when I was 10 years old and we could see the London Eye from our hotel.

Granted, the massive Ferris wheel is hard to miss but located on the South Bank just across from the House of Parliament it is undeniably centrally located.  During my visit many, many years ago I rode on the Ferris wheel with my family and skipped it on my half a dozen trips since then.  However, when my friend Samantha came to visit she definitely wanted to visit and we bought tickets to go on a typical grey English morning.

Because it has been so many years between my trip I forgot how slowly it moves – only 10 inches a second, which is why it takes 30 minutes to make one trip around the massive 443 foot structure.  While no longer the largest Ferris wheel in the world it is truly massive, made clear by the fact that each pod of the wheel can hold 28 people each!

I had forgotten just how much you could see from this height and it was truly incredible to take it all in – from Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace to the Shard and Waterloo station on the other side.

Would you ride the London Eye?