Diamond Jubilee

Well we are a bit behind as usual but this weekend and I guess this week we celebrated the Diamond Jubilee here in London.  It was four days (and an extra day off work) of celebrations for the Queen's 60 year anniversary of taking the throne.  There has been a ton going on, but as the weather has been a bit suspect, we didn't participate in too much.  (If you thought London in May was nice (you know who you are) you should come back now 52 and constant rain for the last 4 days)  We did however participate enough to say we were there and get the T-shirt, but nothing like the people camping out at night to get up close and personal with the queen. 

Sunday was the river pageant, I guess it was essentially a parade just on water.  I was billed as the biggest floatila for 350 years something like 1,000 boats.I had come up with the perfect plan to get a front row seat, but that all went downhill very quickly as they had closed Westminster station due to overcrowding.  It ended up being far more of a popular event than I had expected.  It was at least 5 people deep everywhere we went.  (so don't expect much from the pictures, it was a bit of a lottery just holding up the camera and shooting. double click to enlarge)  My math might be a bit rough, but.........1 person every 2 feet, 7 miles of river, people on both sides 5 deep = 200,000 people.  Not bad considering it was raining all day.  It all started with this barge that had bells on it ringing in the parade.  

Then there were the row boats.  Beginning with this thing....seemed very inefficient, but looked really cool.

It was then followed by just about every form and fashion of other row boat you could imagine.

We had mistakenly thought that the Queen was on the weird boat at the front of the pageant and were headed to leave, but luckily before we managed to make our way out of the crowd her boat popped into sight.

The Queen and Prince Philip are under the golden canopy

Harry and Will are under the red flags in the center...Kate is in
the red towards the back.

From there till the end, an hour and a half of boats later, it was progressively bigger and bigger boats.  

To give you an idea of what the weather was like the tall building in the distance is the Shard.  You can't see the top 30 floors or so in the clouds.  And you can see all the people stacked up on the opposite shore.