Our reserved "flight" on the London Eye was at 10:30 PM. The procedure was to arrive 30 minutes early to stand in the pre-boarding queue. We misjudged our travel time and arrived about 9:15. Since we couldn't yet get in the pre-boarding queue, and we didn't need to stand in the ticket queue, there wasn't anything else to do except walk along the Thames for 45 minutes.

As we neared the Westminster Bridge, I overheard an American girl talking to her friend.

She said, "We flew all the way from America to ride this wheel and today it would have to be closed due to a technical problem!"

I stopped dead in my tracks, grabbed Chu-Wan and we headed back to the wheel at double time.

Sure enough, the wheel had developed an unknown technical fault and was being inspected and no passengers were being admitted for at least one and a half hours..

British Airways was very apologetic about the whole situation and gave us three options.

1. We could come back later today and, if it was working, they'd get us on as soon as possible.
2. We could reschedule for another day. (Our flight was scheduled for the next day, so that was out.)
3. We could get our money back. (But we had to stand in the "get your money back" queue for a couple of hours.)

We decided we'd come back later in the day.

We took the Tube to Greenwich, where we saw the Millennium Dome, another one of London's Year 2000 projects. The Dome is the worlds largest enclosed space and will also operate only one year. In the press there's been a lot of controversy if it will even last the full year. Apparently it's quite awful and the attendance figures are embarrassingly low and is hundreds of millions of Pounds below the projected break-even point. Chu-Wan and I refused to go in. At £20 per person, we want more than some nouveau-techno exhibits on the condition of humanity at the beginning of the 21^st century. Video monitors displaying words for us to think about is just a little too crap for us.

Instead we went to something real and finite: The Prime Meridian. Or, at least we went to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, which is where the Prime Meridian is defined, and is the home of Greenwich Mean Time.

The Prime Meridian is the line which bisects the east and west hemispheres of the Earth. It is exactly opposite of the International Dateline. Once across the dateline, I could say that I've traveled fully half way around the globe - more, in fact, as I've traveled several time zones further east of the International Dateline. I have less than 50% of the world left to traverse to have circumnavigated the globe.

The observatory itself has a museum mostly dedicated to the Royal Astronomers and an interesting section critical need for accurate timekeeping to calculate Longitudes, which was essential for accurate navigation, and the race to develop such a timepiece.

We had fun jumping back and forth across the line for a while, then headed down to the river, where we ran across the Cutty Sark, now permanently in dry-dock, and we stopped for another crummy pizza. Hope springs eternal when it comes to pizza, but it didn't look like I was destined to have a good one in the UK.

We returned to the London Eye about 3:30PM and were able to board almost immediately. I was so relieved. I don't like heights, but I really wanted to ride on the wheel before they tear it down.

The wheel is so big that it holds about 36 capsules, each capable of holding 20-25 people - That's over 700 people at one time! For the most part, the wheel never stops moving, and the whole trip takes 45 minutes. The wheel was so steady that there was hardly a hint of movement, it was like riding a glass elevator.

Two teenage boys were in the capsule with us and at first I thought I might have to find some way to push them out.

They were right behind us in line and spent their time using their binoculars to try to look down women's blouses.

While I applauded their initiative, there were a couple of items that made this distressing to me:

• While there were a few absolutely stunning British women, most of them were less than comment-worthy, and so I thought they might be insane and didn't want to be trapped for 45 minutes in a capsule with them.
• They were incredibly loud and boorish about the whole thing. People 50 feet away could easily hear them going on about it. Being trapped in a capsule with them for 45 minutes like that would have been intolerable.

Once we got in the capsule, and they scoped out the occupants of the two or three capsules below us, they settled down and, amazingly, turned out to be serious architecture freaks. They spent their time pointing out to each other every major architectural feature and famous structure in greater London.

Not being familiar with the city, I used them as spotters to aid in my video recording. They came in very handy. I even thanked them after the ride, but I could see some of the other occupants of our capsule didn't appreciate their commentary at all. They appreciated me even less for thanking them. The boys seemed really pleased.

We had one problem during the ride. On the way up, we could see a big rainstorm approaching us from across the Thames. As we reached the 2 o'clock position we were dead in the thick of it, making spotting difficult. The storm passed as we reached the ground.

Having successfully ridden on the London Eye, our last absolute tourist item was checked off the list.

We headed to the area around Soho, and on New Oxford Street found the Forbidden Planet, a science fiction specialty shop. They were closed, but I made a mental note to return before our flight the next day.