TIME We slept in until 10 a.m. then after showers and breakfast we walked up to Waterloo and by using Tom’s discount card bought two return tickets to Greenwich. We caught the train from Platform A at Waterloo East and watched out of the grimy windows as the grimy inner suburbs of London rolled past outside. It only took 15 minutes to get to Greenwich and it’s grotty, rundown station.
We walked up the street past a couple of bric-a-brac markets, then up the hill to the old Royal Observatory. We took each other’s photo standing with one foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and one foot in the West, then explored the museum’s displays of clocks, telescopes and navigational instruments which have been used over the last 350 years to keep time, spare and distance under control.
Back down in the village we had a cup of hot chocolate in a café and then some hot chips later on after we had walked around the highly unimpressive Cutty Sark. The National Maritime Museum which was our next port of call (a little subtle humour there) was also pretty run-of-the-mill with hall after hall of models and uniforms, all of them pre-Battle of Trafalgar. I had expected more on modern naval history but there was hardly any. [These days, I’m fascinated by age-of-sail history so I would love to see that museum now!]
After we left the museum it began to rain and get quite cold, so we bought some groceries for tea and caught the train back to Waterloo. Linda cooked up a lovely stir fry meal for tea and we watched TV for a while then went to bed…
CurseOfTheTraveller 