Another London Must See Touristy for both Dad, Interrupted and I was to see Bletchley Park. The link here is pretty comprehensive and takes a while to read. If you saw the movie Imitation Game, you know what happened.
If you didn’t see the movie, know this: it was at Bletchley Park where World War II was won, through ridiculously smart code breaking. Hey, I’m not the only one who says it. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower said the same thing.
So, we have to go and see. This is our first foray out of town, and requires a combination of Underground and Railway Services. After an agonizing perusal of the Underground map, we decide that we would Uber to Euston Station and then catch the train out of town. Since Bletchley was considered MST, we don’t want to risk missing an important train.
This logic was going to be our undoing, as the entire itinerary for the entire ten days was MST. Hell, the entire trip was MST.
So I whip Dad, Interrupted into motion, make him run for the Uber, get to Euston, stand in the queue for the tickets, and then we just have to wait for our platform. That seemed simple enough, until we round the corner and see a look just like this:
I didn’t take this picture, but it’s pretty much what we were working with.
Somehow we manage to thread our way through the mass of humanity and get to a train, and get through the English countryside and find Bletchley.
But I have started us out too early, and we have to cool our jets for a half hour in the English mist waiting for the museum to open., open, open. They finally open and we start our day in Nerdvana.
Everywhere you go to be a tourist in Britain, they give you complimentary audio accompaniment, and BP was no exception.
We see it all, again with the day’s worth of steps in by 11 am.
There’s a mansion (bought by the British government to house this excitement) and huts and Bombes and exciting stories like this one about true heroes.
I highly recommend that you read it.
Important decisions were made here, but not by me. I’m just tired of waiting for lunch.
True story about the office I’m standing in: in their pursuit of verisimilitude, the curators of this museum put out a plate of fake cookies on a bookcase. The elementary grade students (with which the grounds were crawling this particular day), spend an hilarious amount of time wondering if the cookies are still edible, this many years after World War II.
The iconic mansion is beautiful; these are not the only ceilings we will admire during the trip.
More Transportation Misadventures: our train s delayed, but we finally limp back to The City to meet Arizona friends at The Kings Arms for drinks and dinner. This may or may not have been another fish and chips episode. I will neither confirm nor deny this.
© E. Stocking Evans 2018
Mom, Interrupted 