Happy Sunday! Patti is the host for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and she is challenging us to tell a story using 1 to 5 photos.

I was frustrated and felt so misled that day.

I’ve watched the changing of the guards on TV back in the day when I got home from half-of-day of high school and had lunch in front of the TV. PBS was on those days and there would always be a travel show on during the lunch hour. Well, it certainly didn’t look at all like the day I witnessed the event.

It was day 4 of my UK adventure and our last day in London. The agenda was to catch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace – something every tourist should witness (or so I’ve been told) – and visit the Tower of London before heading back to the hotel early as we had an early train the next day. For some reason, neither of us remembered to set an alarm and by the time I opened my eyes and checked the time, it was already almost 8 AM. Immediately, I bolted up like waking up from a bad dream.

Despite mom’s friend told us beforehand that everything is not as far apart in the UK as in the U.S., I found that to be not true. When I was planning the trip, I thought, oh, it’s only a mile, not too bad. 15-minute walk? I do that every day anyway. How hard can it be?

Oh no, it’s bad. Not only the miles racks up throughout the day, the time spent walking that mile could’ve been dedicated toward something else.

We left the hotel that day thinking we would have plenty of time to get to Buckingham Palace and find a good place to view the event. We walked the 15 minutes to the train station where I double-checked and even triple-checked the map to make sure we got on the correct train and in a matter of minutes, we were out of the dim underground lighting and back out into the sun, where Google Maps told us we were about 0.9 miles from our destination.

As I grabbed a quick photo, a ground of people approached. With my ears perked up like antenna, I overheard someone asked if the group was heading in the direction of Buckingham Palace. Great, I thought, just follow the group of tourists.

We followed the group of people through the park and the closer we got to the palace, the more crowded it got. It was as if people were magically appearing from all corners of the park. Where did these people come from? I wondered before we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a crowd heading toward the same location to witness the same thing.

Despite being pretty high up, I couldn’t see anything other than people’s backs in front of me. My phone was low on battery as getting to the palace burned through my battery. So on my tip-toes, I aimed the camera as high up as I could and with fingers crossed that the auto-focus works, I clicked, clicked, and clicked.