London at night (evening day 4, Saturday, Sept. 3)

Taking a turn on the Millennium Eye is a terribly tacky, touristy thing to do, with cattle lines reminiscent of a trip to Disney World and you may think, do I really want to spend £28 (that’s the basic no frills non-fast check-in if you prepay through the website price), but I think these pictures will convince you it’s worth the cost (especially if your husband is paying). And I’d like to say it was a magical ride but frankly I was so busy taking photos I missed the magic. Click the pictures to enlarge.

Looking down at Parliament/Westminster Abbey

The Millennium Wheel or London Eye, erected as the name would suggest to be ready for 2000, is on the south bank of the Thames opposite Parliament, just to the right of Westminster Bridge. It’s 443 feet tall and it takes about 30 minutes to make one revolution. It turns so slowly, in fact, that it doesn’t need to stop to load each car’s 25 passengers, although the attendants do hustle you on board. We booked our tickets through the website and used the will call kiosk (difficult to find amid all the people queueing to buy tickets), but we still had to wait about 30 minutes in the cattle line for our scheduled 8:30 ticket time. We were asked whether we had any sharp objects and a wand was passed over us and at the end of the night we saw attendants using mirrors to inspect the underside of the benches in the empty cars.

London Eye Inside our car

To take these photos, I of course turned off the flash, unlike many of the people taking photos, and put my camera into manual mode to take two-second exposures. I also used the two-second timer and placed the camera on the horizontal ribs of the car to reduce jostling as I took the pictures, and it worked quite well. I often was kneeling and shooting between the legs of the other passengers.

The start of the circuit Looking eastcar

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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