"There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats"

So how do you top an evening like that?

Well, I'm not sure that you can. But we can do something very nearly as good. The sun was shining and the weather was delightful and all four of us were free. The Builder can come out to play today. Let's go and play on the river!

So that's what we did.

Someone (that would be the airline Etihad) has built a cable car that runs between the Excel Centre and the Millennium Dome (now renamed as the O2 Arena - but I have rebelliously continued to call it the Dome!!). It is intended as a quick way for commuters and tourists to get from one side of the river to the other and you can use your Oyster card (like a Myki card but without all the attendant trauma and controversy) to pay for it.  I hadn't realised it was being built until I happened to see a news article saying that it was finished and open. Once I did realise it was there I really, really wanted to go on it.  So that's what we did. We took the (lovely) DLR to the cable car terminus and went on it across to the Dome. (It had stopped running a couple of times on Wednesday but mercifully was very well behaved yesterday.) You do get some fabulous views of East London, Central London and the river.

Then we wandered along, past the Dome, to the boat stage - where we could also use our Oyster cards to pay. It's a commuter boat rather than a cruise-along-and-admire-the-sights boat but at the time we were out and about it was mostly tourists who were using it.  We went up as far as The Eye - necessarily passing under Tower Bridge, much to my pleasure.  Tower Bridge is adorned with Olympic rings at the moment and I didn't expect to get to London during the Games to get a photo of it.  I have lots of photos now!

Anyway. We got to The Eye and went for a lovely potter about Southbank.  Ross wanted to go in and admire the Festival Hall, so we did. There were lots of people out to play (school holidays, Olympics, sunshine - and the torch relay had gone past shortly before we got there so there were lots of additional activities going on). Everyone was happy and smiling and cheery (was a bit odd; normally Londoners are in a terrible hurry to get places and get grumpy if you are pottering about in their way!!!). We stopped at a pizza place that a friend of Freyja's had said was good. And they were right. The pizzas were very good. Then we ambled along to London Bridge and hopped on the tube and the DLR and went back to collect the car which Premier Inn had allowed us to leave in their car park for the day even though we had checked out at 10 am. We took Freyja home and made our way back to Sheffield, where we abandoned Ross in a pub (largely because he had spotted Tabitha, Gareth and Cally in the beer garden :-D  ).  So we said hello to them and then went back to Chesterfield.

It was a lovely, lovely day. It was a lovely, lovely mid-week weekend.  It was a bit of a struggle to get up and come to work this morning. But after all - it's only one day and then I get another weekend!

And here is the pictorial record of our day out on the river.  Click on the photo to get to the album