The days are cloudier now, but still dry. We are incredibly blessed with the weather, this trip.

Today is a day spent in Greenwich, again with our Arizona friends, so it’s off to the Thames to pick up a boat (still part of the Underground system, so our Oyster cards work) and head east.

First up is the Cutty Sark. Fun fact: the whiskey was named after the ship, not the other way around. And the ship made its name running, not whiskey, but tea.

Fun Made Up Fact, derived after wandering around London and this ship: everyone in England is drinking tea because the East India Company found a whole bunch of tea, needed someone to sell it to, and so they got some royals to start drinking it to make it look cool. (Don’t quote me on this one, or if you do, remind the listener that I was delirious from walking across London for days.)

The observatory is very cool; lots of Jules Verne features. The view is spectacular, naturally, because it’s on the highest hill around for, like, ever. My knees, still aggrieved from the fall in March, notice this, and start to complain about the working conditions.

But no time to linger! We head back down the hill and find the Greenwich foot tunnel, built to help workers get back and forth across the Thames without a ferry.

I really wanted to see this, and so we marched back to Canary Wharf under the water. The tunnel was damaged during World War II, and it’s marked as such.

 

But we are still not done. It’s time for lunch/dinner/linner/dunch? and the place to go is The Crispy Pig, which I think is under the London Bridge. It was excellent.

And now I am advised that it is not a restaurant named The Crispy Pig, it is a place where you can get crispy pig. And so we could.

And like a relentless Ginsu knife commercial, we are still not done. We are within striking distance of the Golden Hind (or replica of same), which Sir Francis Drake used to be pretty much a pirate for Elizabeth I. We can’t board the ship to see it because there’s a reality show being filmed on it. Suffice it to say: it’s about the size of a double decker bus. I can’t imagine crossing the river on it, much less go around the world on it, raiding Spanish forts and shipping while I go.

At one point on this day or the day before, we finished our day with Aperol spritzers at a very nice pub near Paddington station. It’s all a blur at this point. A fun, exhausted, history-saturated blur.

© E. Stocking Evans 2018