London, day six….
So I got behind a day. I started coming down with a cold on Saturday and it hit me pretty hard. I went to bed early since we had to get up early this morning (Sunday) and catch the train to Paris. (I’ll write up today’s events in another post, so I can keep the ordering straight here)
On our last full day in London, we headed to Greenwich. This was going to be Isaac’s and I only day ‘out of the city’. I say that, even though you can practically still see London. Rosie had spent Thursday visiting her companies UK office, so it was her second day trip. One of the top things on my list was visiting the Royal Observatory and standing on the Prime Meridian. This has to be a required stop for all geeks.
The trip there was part Underground and then you switched to above ground trains. I have to stay the tube stop at Canary Wharf was one of the prettiest we’d seen. You left the Underground and had to walk through this big shopping mall/office building. We ended up having lunch at the mall before getting on the train to Greenwich.
Once we were done with lunch, we got on the train and made the 15 minute run to Greenwich. Even though the train was above ground, the station at Greenwich had us arrive a couple levels below ground. After making our way back up and out of the station, we popped out into Greenwich down at the dock. The Royal Obsevatory is located about 15 minutes across town (and up a rather steep hill). The view from up there was really amazing, luckily the nices weather we had the whole week was Saturday afternoon.
We bought our tickets and got the little recorded tour guide players, then started walking around. The first stop was the actual Prime Meridian. They have a brass line set tin he stone in the court yard, where you can see the longitude of different city’s. (Here is required picture of standing on both sides)
There was a big plaque which explained why our GPS devices wouldn’t read zero at this spot, due to the fact that back in 1884 when the line was decided upon, the telescopes they were using weren’t ‘prefect‘. Now we use signals from the GPS satellites and the actual Prime Meridian is about 100 meters from where the line located. Damn technologies is always messing things up.
The next stop was the fancy observation room built on top of the Observatory, which is actually called the “Star Room”. The whole tour was about how time, the stars and navigation were wrapped together for so long. In this room one of the early Astronomers Royal, John Flamsteed made a bunch of really important star charts.
The room is amazing, it is a big Ocagon and all the windows have these grids built into them to make it easier to set up the telescopes. There is also a huge clock that was a modern master piece of its time. Most of the clock was built into the walls. There were actually two, each with 14 foot pendulums that was custom made.
The rest of the tour was focused on the big contest to make a clock that would keep time on a boat, they had the original four models of John Harrison’s clocks (H1-H4) on display, which finally won th 20,000 pound prize for being able to keep time while at sea.After finishing the tour, we wondered around Greenwich a little and had some snacks. Rosie found this vegan treat shop on the way in, which we stopped at as we headed out. They had the most amazing vegan brownie made out of sweet potatoes. I don’t like sweet potatoes, but I bribed Isaac to have half of his brownie after mine disappeared. I think this sign sums it up pretty well….
After that we wondered down to the dock and then got on the train ride home. I had started out that morning with a little bit of a stuffy nose, by the evening it had turned into a full on head cold. So we had dinner at a Thai place close to the flat and turned in early.Random Observations:
So I might have mentioned before that nearly every Tube stop has a Starbucks, which is great. But as I discovered, most of them don’t have cold black tea for my Black Tea lemonades. So most of the week I have been having London Fogs, which is a Earl Grey with steamed soy milk and a couple shots of vanilla syrup. (You should try it, they are great!) But even that become difficult to get, because putting steamed soy milk into tea just isn’t a common thing. This is the Starbucks in Greenwich, which was the coolest one I have seen the whole trip.