ceremony of keys

Linda, It's call an International Reply Coupon and you buy them at the Post Office. I was just there and the postman told me they cost around $2.00 now.(depending on the other country) and are worth the lowest postal rate. They cost more than they are really worth in terms of postage costs but there you go. FYI sometimes you might have to ask more than one postal clerk as, I have found, all of them are not all familiar with them.

Linda, as Laurel said they are International Rely Coupons. You will need to send two of them with your request for tickets to the ceremony.

Linda-do NOT be late for the ceremony. They will not let you in, even if you're only a measly 4 minutes late and out of breath from running from the tube station. We've probably been blacklisted now.

Thank you very much. I will go to the post office on Monday and will not be late for the ceremony (or if I am late, I won't run -- unless I see a good pub).

Hi Linda, Karen makes a great point about NOT being late. I know someone that arrived as they were closing the gate, they were not permitted in. Go early, you can sit and people watch. Have a great time. I've been to the ceremony six times and have enjoyed each and every time.

Our problem was that the underground line we were taking, I think the Circle or District, had a train that was terminating before the Tower stop. We had to wait for a different train. Seems to be something more likely to happen at night. We were cutting it too close to start, and then that compounded it.

Karen run into some bad luck. We always use the Circle or District Line to get to Tower Hill and have never had the problem Karen had. But one never knows, they close down lines at times for different reasons.

One more thing. The first time I sent for "tickets" to the ceremony the confirmation came back with the wrong names. Mr & Mrs, etc instead of Laurel and Karen.. I called and they said they'd correct it but I had to send IRC's again!

Linda:

I sent off for our tickets in mid-March for our trip in the latter part of June. I sent a brief letter of request for the tickets, including our names, ages, dates, and two International Reply Coupons. In about three weeks, I received the tickets in the self-addressed envelope I included. So they are pretty efficient about this. I sent off early because we only had one available night, and we got tickets. The funny part of this was having to go to three post offices to get the IRC's. One didn't know what I was talking about, and thought I was crazy when I explained it and gave them the postal service product code for them. The next one knew what they were, but was out of them. They called another and they directed me to yet another that had them. Not out of the way as I pass each of these each day. I got to the one that had them, and fortunately one of the clerks was from Laos and spoke French. As it turns out, the IRC is all written in French.

C`est la vie