5 Cards Dealt to Amsterdam: A Long Weekend in London (October Break, 2016)

We made our first (and only) family trip to London last year for our October break. I'll skip the long-winded witticisms and get to the pictures as our current October break is quickly approaching and I don't like being a year behind.

Buckingham Palace

We happened to visit (the outside only) during a classic car show. I enjoyed it.

Streets of London

This exhibit was one of the highlights of the week. No pictures allowed. ;)

The National Gallery from Trafalgar Square

On the Millennium Bridge

From the London Eye...

The Tower of London

These ravens were huge.

Big Ben... Parliament

Westminster Abbey

London Bridge

Matilda!

This show deserves its own blog entry. It was terrific.

Wicked!

This one was not.

Natural History Museum

Harry Potter World
This was the highlight of the trip from my perspective, as you'll no doubt note from the volume of pictures to follow. The movies were filmed on location here, and it basically remains as it was.

The Great Hall

Potions... Snape's classroom.

The snakes move - this was not CGI.

This WAS CGI.

The ice sculpture at the ball held during the Tri-Wizard cup as I recall...
I am sure that any one of my daughters will correct me if I'm mistaken.

Dumbledore' office

So as it turns out, a LOT of the scenes were done with robotics as opposed to CGI.
Professor Lupin here, in his alt-form.

Diagon Alley & The Weasley's Shop

The next bits were my favorites - models. Everything they created started with drawings, which became paper models and grew from there. I was not prepared for the final model.

As we wound our way through the last of the paper models we spilled out into a huge room containing this:

You get some idea of the scale from this perspective as those people to the left of the Great Hall are in the 6' range.

The lighting is continuously, slowly cycling to show off the castle at different times of the day. I could have walked around it all day. The detail was really incredible.