Eric’s friend and classmate, Ian, is in London for a school project and joined us for dinner along the Thames. We needed to be across the river at 9:30pm for the Tower Keys Ceremony, and headed over at 9:00pm with a comfortable margin for the ten minute walk – then a cruise ship decided to leave port through the bridge. It was fun standing next to the Tower Bridge while it opened, and we raced up the stairs and stood by the lifted roadway as the cruise ship sailed by; the ship’s passengers even higher up waved down at us.

Tower Bridge at night, open

As fun as that was, it used up almost all of our margin time to make it to the Tower of London gate for the ceremony. The Tower Keys Ceremony is the longest continuous running ceremony in the world, having now happened every single day for over 700 years. It is a military ceremony for locking the huge gates to the London Tower each evening, and if you are lucky enough to see it, as we were, you also end up locked inside. It is near impossible to enter the grounds after that, but if you’re polite and don’t misbehave your Yeoman tour guide will let you out through a door in the gates afterwards.