The next day was Saturday.  We had nothing scheduled after the tour on Friday and F was starting to feel bad so we took our time getting dressed and going down for the breakfast buffet.  Once again fended off the kids' price for F - this time I thought I really should be answering "how old is your daughter" with "how young do we need her to be".

We put on our coats and such and ventured out.

F is quite the Harry Potter fan.  I haven't read the books but she read each one the minute it came out, even attending at least one midnight party at a bookstore in Memphis in order to score her copy at the first possible instant.  So we had to go to King's Cross Station and find this:

Outside King's Cross we saw beautiful St. Pancras.

And I wanted to go to Charing Cross Station, because that story has caught my fancy since I first read it while in college, and I wanted to see it and see how it is currently marked.  Here is Wikipedia's article about the Eleanor crosses.  As the article states, the original Charing Cross was destroyed by the Puritans.  During the Victorian era, a replacement cross was erected close by.

When you get off the train at the station, and you are still underground, you see an explanation of the building of the first Charing Cross and a beautiful mural.  This video is only about a third of the mural.

And then we went outside and saw the cross itself, though as noted, it is not the original.

We walked around and found the statue of Charles I that is now in the spot where the original Charing Cross was.

The pedestal must be made of some kind of limestone.  It is sadly eaten away.  I suppose this is the ultimate fate of most of these statues - well, ultimately, all of them.

And of course we found ourselves at Trafalgar Square and were able to take our time looking at those lions, and the other statues (some very fanciful merpeople) and memorials.  I'll put up some pix of those, but I want to mention that there were some schoolchildren there, not British, who came around and asked F and me for our autographs.  They were collecting these from tourists.  Very cute.