Begin with the end in mind.... this was a great day! 💕
7/29 - Monday - Today needs a theme song CLICK HERE
what the hell..... every day needs a theme song!
- Greenwich Observatory CLICK HERE Reservation # 20240723-10380993
2024-07-29
6:30am
I may be in trouble today, or maybe not.
My wall-mates woke at 6am with either a loud alarm or video games. It's now 6:27 & they're watching tv - maybe softly, but - ugh.
Looking at my Greenwich tickets - also ugh - somehow i selected 7-24 instead of 7-29.
I'm going anyway. But really - this could be an awful mixup. Idk if this is one of those where they'll just send me through for the honest mistake or tell me “No honey, you'd need to buy another ticket and we're all sold out for the day.” Ever so politely, but it will break my heart.
I'll get started early maybe - but not this early. I just wish they wouldn't have the tv on…even low - ugh. I don't want to face London streets at rush hour this early.
***
8:03am
My wall-mates got worse, so I’ve now showered & am listening to them loudly pack up. Maybe I’ll be lucky and no wall-mates for the last couple of days? Someone who sleeps? Someone who doesn’t have a partner to talk with all morning? Do people usually talk this much in the morning? Note to others: When you’re in a cheap hotel with thin walls, please do your best to be respectful of noise level.
Lots of noise outside the room now…. I think they’re gone! Yay!
Was getting creative with my Tiny Space this morning
Look! Trash can is a table now! Super useful!
I gave up and repurchased the tickets. I read all the small print about non-transferrable and arrive within a half hour of your scheduled ticket. By this time I COULD have bought a Royal Observatory membership and it would have been less expensive. Note to others: The membership actually is a reasonable option - for 50￡ individual or if you’re bringing kids it’s a 60￡ family (+15￡ for second adult on either) - you probably get discounts in the store - really wish I had thought about that a little harder on round 1. But it’s not like I’m making multiple trips to London in a year and I hadn’t even thought about the “small print” on the tickets.
Ok, it’s behind me. Let’s get the schedule straight this morning because there’s lots to do in Greenwich!
New schedule! (I’ll fit in eating edgewise, but this is also why I bring granola bars)
It takes about an hour to an hour & a half to get to Greenwich, so must start by 9:30
11:00 am Cutty Sark - AUDIO GUIDE TICKETS
12:00 pm National Maritime Museum (free) TICKETS <order conf 20240729-10421046>
1:00 pm Queens House (free) TICKETS <order conf 20240729-10421046>
1:30 pm Greenwich Observatory TICKETS
3:30 pm Planetarium TICKETS
It was funny - last week I told someone I was going to London & their reply was “Oh you MUST go to XYZ restaurant while you’re there!” And I looked at him bug-eyed. Food is the thing I squeeze in while I’m on the way to what I’m DOING.
I’ll eat when the museums shut me out. It will be fine.
In the meantime - it’s a good time to go grab coffee & get my bum moving!
9:00 AM - Lava Cafe: Ordered Cafe Americano & Full English Breakfast
Abs is back today & flattering me by saying "You look beautiful today!" I demured & he says "Oh don't be embarassed."
I"ll end up needing to stop coming here if he flatters me so much. He says "Oh, I'll make you a good one," to my breakfast order. Three days left in London.
He asked me later if I wrote about him - I told him "I wrote that you flirt too much & my boyfriend will be upset with me so I shouldn't come back." He said "Don't worry, it's not like that." I know that - but it's funny to tease him, while setting boundaries.
I'm not a fan of baked beans and wasn't excited about the triange hash browns. The mushrooms were really fabulouss and the tomato hit the spot. Sausages had a really nice flavor as well. I will never understand why people complain about English food. But I suppose if they're not as busy as I am then they're just eating & looking for something more? No clue.
Soooo.... observatory. Too much time and too little to do.... stop.... reverse that!
I was stuffed before I left, but that was good, because everything was back-to-back on my schedule and I needed to make it last. I'm glad yesterday was a rest day.
Subway Art!!! Love this!
So I took the Circle Line (District line on return trip) over to the DLR - a subway connection that is technically not the Tube anymore, but it is a train that goes over the River to Greenwich & beyond. It begins at "Dock" and obviously has a different color code than Tube, though same symbol. Total cost for one-way between my hotel & Greennwich was about 6￡ compared to the 23￡ or so if I'd taken a cab. I love how Google maps gives me all that info. It doess take longer than the cab, but most of that is walking from the stations, not the difference in travel time.
First Stop off in Greenwich was the Cutty Stark - The only remaining Cutter ship that was used for the India Tea Trading. I learned a lot about ship - and would have loved to buy several of the books they had on display in the gift shop. I did manage to control myself, though.
Here's a little Toy ship they had inside - It doesn't look like the Cutty Sark, but... also, sort of does.
But REALLY - I LOVE how everywhere I looked today in this exhibit there were places for children to play interactively with learing activities tha would interest & distract them while the adults could read or listen to the adult educational things. This is so..... HEALTHY! And teaches kids to love learning!
See? Learning About Ballast! They could do this in space exhibits, too -
because they needed to calculate the effect of moon rock on return flights.
OOPS! Wind blew the boat to the side & all the boxes Sllliiiiid over that way....
setting them all out evenly didn't guarantee the ballast wouldn't tip the ship if they could slide.
Another cubby for a kid play space! LOVE IT!!!
Ok, this is a small exhibit of the internal Skeleton of a ship (I looked it up - the "keel" is the backbone that runs the length of the bottom, but the structural side supports... they're "Ribs" - so you may as well call this a skeleton. The ribs in the Cutty Sark were made of steel (painted white) - one of the earliest examples of this. The hull was brass sheeting with wood sheet upper sides above the waterline. Brass helps preve barnacle groth & avoids wood borers, to help the ship last longer.
There was a fire in 2007, but most of the burnable parts were out for refurbishment, so the Cutty Sark is still mostly origial materials.
Cool knots used for different parts of rigging. Oher neat notes - there's like
11 MILES of rigging used on this ship. There are also 32 sails.
The Rope Ladders that go up to the masts & sails are called "Rat Lines."
Big Ship (Stern) - ran lots of tea, wool, and opium for the Brittish. Making money every direction
and keeping those 5-10,000￡ a year boys in the Jane Austen novels quite flush.
Bow!
Wheel is in the Stern - The gearwork behind in the big chest makes sure that the turning of the wheel actually turns the rudder the right direction, because there's a lot of gears & mechanics involved in getting the movement of tha wheel translated down behind the keel.
(I'm set on learning my vocabulary here)
Sextant, I'm pretty sure. Could be an Octant, but it's just a little shorter part of the circle.
A few views of the Below decks
The 'chandaliers" are actually cup-holders. A pretty cool way of keeping their ale from spilling.
The backs of the seatts swivel both directions - thank the kid who came in & played with it because I wouldn't have realized it otherwise. Yay for kids who explore & experiment with their environments!
I'm guessing they'd use more metalware than stoneware.... jus sayin'
I think they said this was shared between three of the officers. Obviously, all three of them could never be sleeping at the same time. I'm sure the 2 bunks enforced that rule.
This is what it looks like from the outside. It was grounded & cemented away from the Thames.
The glass windows are letting light into the cafe & gift shop below, where the hull is visible.
Poor Ship.... has everybody looking at its bumm!
Interesting tidbit about the name "Cutty Sark"...
CLICK HERE
After that I did go into the Maritime Museum for a while. I needed to climb the hill up to the Greenwich Observatory (the MAIN EVENT), so I didn't have much time. But I did run upon some tidbits that got my feathers ruffled about how the Brits got all superior at Americans during our Civil War because *they* had banished slavery (well.... on their island anyway) - and when they DID get around to banishing slavery around the rest of their Kingdom... well... let's just say that they were pretty lukewarm about their commitment to it.
But they also had cool science things to show off in their display
"how we figure out where we're going & whether a storm's coming"
You're feeling sick? Let me see how badly I can poison you without killing you.
Yeah.... these is surgical tools.
translate: If I'm not poisoning you, then I'm trying to cut it off/out.
These too
This is an iteresting rope /rigging tool
YAY!!! IT'S TIME FOR THE OBSERVATORY!!!!!
Story Time, kiddies
You've heard about Greenwich Mean Time? GMT? Come on... you've heard it in a movie or see it referenced in a news report? Earthquake in Tanzania?
So there's this thing.... Americans.... the world doesn't revolve around US. Literally, it revolves around the AXIS. BUT! TIME is revolving around Britain. Specifically, this little posh retreat area for Royals getting away from Plague Ridden London, where some of their elite astronomers thought it might be nice to build an Observatory. It was then... not so much now. But it was back in the 18th century that their rubber really hit the road.
See that cool building up on the hill, beyond the terracing where it looks like they're setting up for a concert venue? That's not a church. It's where Astronomers looked at the stars. Let's look closer...
Pretty, isn't it?
The observatory part is actually out to the left & behind the tree. What you're looking at is the Flamsteed House, where the original observatory was,
but not the one that established *today's* Greenwich Mean Time.
That one's off to the back & the left side of the picture, behind the tree.
So I was kind of miffed - I've used the audio for Dickens... and Cutty Stark... but the download failed me for Greenwich Observatory. So I don't have great notes and will need to give you the shorter, dirtier version.
So.... Nicholas Flammel.... wait.... no...
John Flamsteed - this is his first telescope here. And it was a giant flop.
But he was the first Royal Astronomer and parts of the house (particularly the Octagon Room) were designed & built by Christopher Wren (who built St Paul's Cathedral - that's Wednesday).
THIS room.... with the telescope propped up precariously on a ladder
& a giant quadrant outside view on the right.
Surrounded by lots of Granfather clocks.... because this story is also about CLOCKS.
The SECOND Astronomer Royale (court was still speaking French back then) was Edmond Halley -
you might recognize the name because he was kind of good at finding comets.
Unfortunately, he was kid of bad at the other thing he set himself to doing, which was tracking the movement of the Moon so they could use Astronomy to determine longitude.
They actually had to SCRAP all that work of his when the next Astronomer Royale took over.
James Bradley. He was much better.
These are Astronomers 6-10. The title has been retired... or at least
they're no longer working out of Greenwich.
What Halley DID do to help us along was to establish a 20,000 ￡ reward to the guy (because they're all guys working on this, really) who could come up with Clock that could enable them to determine Longitude.
WTF? You're asking?
Ok... I get it. So here's the deal. LATITUDE is EASY. You just figure out the angle of the North Star and *boom* - you've got how far around the globe you are from where it is directly overhead (90°) - we're spinning *around* the North Star essentially. And there's a South Star if you're in the Southern Hemisphere. They stay in the same place all night. If you keep your Quadrant/Sextant/Octant pointed there while you're sailing, the next thing you bump into it the same distance between the equator & the north pole.
They come in lots of sizes. The bigger they are, the more precise
your measurement from degrees into minutes & seconds
But Longitude - not so easy. Because Longitude is how far east or west you are of a certain point.... and guess what.... that's how the earth's spinning. So there's no set point to start measuring from. You can tell if you're going east or west because you have a Compass. But not how FAR east or west.
That's why Halley was working on the Moon things - He was taking lots of measurements about the moon's position in relationship to nearby stars in hopes of establishing a reference book for Captains (who had to be astronomers & mathematicians & meteorologists & physicists - this was all in their job requirements, along with being a human resources specialist & manager - tough job to do out in the middle of an ocean away from the possibility of hiring/firing people).
Did I mention that he created a prize? Right. So thank you Bank of England inflation calculator - 20,000 ￡ in 1630 translates to 3.7 million￡ sterling, today. Which translates into about $5M US.
Big old Grandfather Clock
THIS is where Clocks came in. Because, while that wasn't the only way to do it, it ends up being the most practical, if you want to minimize the number of calculations a captain will have to do AND you want to be able to determine longitude at sea, where you're constantly floatig - so by the time you've gotten your lunar bearings and completed the (sometimes) hundreds of small calculations, you may have floated ino a completely different longitude.
And the REASON for the competition is because there was a deadline. 1762 & 1769. Another one of Halley's brilliant ideas - and he was right about this - using Venus's transit across the sun (happens every 122 years, 8 years apart) tot determine Earth's distace from the Sun.... and thereby the distance of every other planet from the Sun.
ANYWAY. John Harrison starts working on the clock thing.
This is a pendulum clock - not one of Harrison's.
Pendulums sort of get messed up on a ship.... with things rocking...
This is a picture of the inner workings of the H4 clock
The one where Harrisosn's 40 years of work was actually considered a success.
I think this is H-1 or H-2
H-3
H-4 insides - pretty, isn't it? Petit compared to the other ones?
And once they got an easier face to read,
it became something that every Captain would have.
Because.... this kept time with Greenwich, England.
And the Observatory dropped a ball every day at 1pm,
for every captain to set his clock to.
And THIS, is how England won the Navigation War.
Yep- that's the PRIME MERIDIAN - zero degrees longitude.... stepping in two hemispheres.
The big one
New building - cool building - Newton's name is on it - go through it to get to the Planetarium.
QUEEN's House - down the hill - lots of amazing paintings - the originals - in al kinds of textbooks
none of these is George Washington... just saying... I don't care how much they look like him
Dinner 5pm (only thing in between was a Kind bar & lemon soda)
Goddard’s at Greenwich - lamb & Rosemary pie with mash & gravy, London Pride Amber Ale, desert is rhubarb crumble & custard
Heaven after a long day - i think my publican is named Jake? Brain low on nutrients retains shite.
Stephen is on clean up. Very cheery all.
Good night everyone - tomorrow is Canterbury! and Dover!
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