Buckingham Palace

Ah, Buckingham Palace. Home to the famous soldiers with big top hats that show no emotion.

When I planned my trip to London, England, I made sure to include the famous home of the queen. In fact, it was the very first stop of the day.

I arrived by bus fresh off of a trip to see Moulin Rouge in Paris, France. I would not recommend going by overnight bus to London.

The bus left around 10:30 at night. I knew that I probably wouldn't have the best night's rest but thought that it might be a fun, cheaper experience. I was dead wrong. The bus stopped so many times. We had to get out multiple times as well.

Enough of that tangent, back to Buckingham Palace. We arrived early in the morning - around 6 a.m. local time.

We knew a lot of things wouldn't be open that early, so we set about seeing Buckingham Palace, since we didn't really expect to enter it anyway.

When we arrived we looked everywhere for the soldiers. They were nowhere to be found. I had read somewhere that they are always on guard. That didn't seem to be the case for us, which was odd.

We saw soldiers with guns, to be sure. But no funny top hats and red suits.

We even waited around for a while to no avail. It didn't really matter though. We had a full agenda of things to see and that was only the beginning. If we had time, we had decided that we would come back to get pictures with them.

I doubt that anyone traveling to Buckingham Palace will have the misfortune of not finding the funny red soldiers to take pictures with. It would seem that our experience was one in a million.