Sometimes a fun day as a tourist is really the unscheduled one, in which you just wander around figuring out that all those Tube stops are really close to each other and seeing where the roads lead.

We had one of those days one weekend. We started the day by visiting Brompton Oratory which is enormous (bigger than Nashville's Cathedral), lovely and quite orthodox, which was a change from the place we visited one week, where a lay woman gave a homily suggesting that switching to a sustainable, green lifestyle was the true meaning of Lent. We went from there to Trafalgar Square and lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt nearby. Here you can see me sitting in Trafalgar Square in my typical "searching the map in the guidebook to figure out exactly where I am" pose.

The Cafe in the Crypt was ok, but nothing special food-wise and I'm not at all convinced that there isn't something rather wrong about dining on top of people's gravestones. I probably would not return to one, although the prices are fairly cheap, which is always welcome. Of course, we were all still hungry after lunch, so it may not really have been such a bargain.

After lunch we decided to just walk around for a while and headed up towards Piccadilly Circus. We stopped in at Hatchard's so my husband could look around and where my son bought a book detailing the history and reasons behind the names of all the Tube stations. He began and has not yet stopped reading the detailed entries to me (my parents will think this fitting punishment for their daughter who often insisted on reading whole trivia books out loud to them). Then again we went next door to Fortnum and Mason's, because my husband hadn't gotten to see that either. We did not buy any chocolate covered bugs, but we did stop at the ice cream fountain and share a couple of sundaes.

We turned a different way on our path out of Fortnum and Mason's and discovered China Town. My husband spent ten years of his childhood in a Chinese country and so I think he enjoyed ambling past all the little stands with fried ducks (with beaks still on) and other things of the sort. We stopped and watched a vendor making dragon's beard candy as it started to rain, but it was a fairly light rain so we kept on walking.

We went on to Covent Garden and watched some of the street performers and finally headed home after a long day of rambling and just enjoying life in London.