Greenwich

Our Great British Adventure

May 8, 2018

We were up very early as we had to return our car to Heathrow by 9.30am. The motorway traffic was absolutely horrendous - lots of stop-start and multi-mile queues. That we arrived just 10 minutes late was a minor miracle. We'd paid to drop the car off empty and thought the tank cost a bit over the top - until we saw that fuel was about 1.25 pounds per litre (about $2.25!) all over the country. After we dropped the car off, we caught the shuttle to the terminal and then hopped onto the Tube. It just happened that the line that runs to Heathrow (Picadilly) had a stop at Russell Square, where our hotel was. It was one hour, but was very simple.

We found our hotel without trouble but as it was only lunchtime we expected to drop our bags off and then have to roam around for a few hours before check-in opened. Amazingly they checked us in immediately so we had the chance to relax for a bit before we headed out to explore.

We trekked to Greenwich to see the Royal Observatory, the meridian line, and Harrison's timekeepers. Google maps gave me the two trains needed to get to the vicinity but then - like it did in Oslo when I was trying to find Vigeland Park - gave me absolutely terrible walking directions. Still, we got there in the end.

We did the tourist thing of straddling the meridian (one foot in the east! one foot in the west!), and we were amazed at the view from the camera obscura, but the highlight for me was the clocks. Anthony said on his last visit they had two versions working but this time around they had all four versions and all were working. Before these clocks mariners couldn't venture into the open ocean as they had no way to determine their longitude. They changed history and were amazing to see. The irony of them being in the Royal Observatory was palpable - the astronomers did everything possible to retard the clock's development believing the solution to the longitude problem lay with sky mapping and the feud was quite bitter.