London is the last port of call for our cruise. We sailed slowly up the Thames this morning. When I say slowly I mean it - especially when we had to thread our way through the Thames Barrier. The widest gap in the barrier is 100ft and our ship is 93 ft wide. So it was a tight squeeze.
Eventually we arrived at Greenwich and dropped anchor near the Cutty Sark. We still have to take Thames clipper ships to get to shore.
After a long wait before they finally cleared us, Becky and I made our way to the dock and walked up the hill to the Greenwich Royal Observatory (where the Prime Meridian that marks 0 degrees longitude is marked) and we did the usual tourist trick of standing with one foot in each of the eastern and western hemispheres.
It was a lovely day and the views from the top of the hill were great.
Then we went to the Maritime Museum, which was a lot more interesting than I was expecting and is definitely worth a visit, if you're ever in Greenwich. I only wanted to see the Franklin letter (the only communication ever found from the doomed expedition to try and find the northwest passage through the arctic). I did see this, but also found the exhibition about Tudor and Stuart ships interesting. Especially fascinating was the section on Nelson and Trafalgar - they even had Nelson's coat on display, complete with bullet hole.
Unforunately we were a bit late in the day and the museum was closing at 5pm, so we didn't get to see much else. We walked over to Greenwich market and, it being Sunday, managed to get a proper Sunday roast dinner at the Admiral Hardy pub, even though it was early evening by now.
Then it was back to the ship for a few last cocktails before retiring to the room to finish our packing and put our cases out. Tomorrow is disembarkation day.
No comments:
Post a Comment