Once on the boat it was a relaxing and interesting ride for everyone. The 3yo, on my lap, was very pleased to be sitting in the front corner of the ferry, where he had an excellent view of a looped rope being tossed and tightened to secure the boat to the pier each time it stopped.
By the time we got to Greenwich, it was well lunchtime. We looked in a couple of restaurants in the village, but decided that we were likely to pay about the same, and more efficiently, by eating at the museum café. So straight to the National Maritime Museum we went.
The approach has a long trough of running water coming from each side and meeting at drains in the middle. It would be a good place to sail a paper boat. The children threw autumn leaves in it to amuse the 3yo.
Museum cafés don't seem to cost significantly more than regular restaurants here in London, especially if you factor in a small tip. The cafeteria format makes it easy for the littlest verbal children to choose what they want. There are often tables large enough to accommodate our entire family. They are located right where we want to be. And the food has been reliably good.
This one had cold sandwiches and salads, paninis that could be heated on request, and a small hot bar with a child's plate, two plates of the day, and soup. Also, as at the Tower of London, you could put together a child's box lunch out of a small sandwich, a bag of chips, a juice box, and two cold sides like gelatin dessert or grapes.
Three kids got the £5 hot child's plate of breaded chicken, fries, and English baked beans. Two teen boys got fat individually-baked casseroles of beautifully browned macaroni and cheese. I got a cold veggie wrap filled with greens, crunchy pickled carrots, and some kind of red-pepper-and-hummus-like spread, plus tomahto soup. And Mark got a plate of hot salt beef brisket with potatoes gratin (not the cheese kind, the buttery baked kind) and chunks of roasted carrots.
I am going to miss the universal availability of bottled sparkling water. Everywhere there is bottled water, there is sparkling water for the same price as still.
Satisfied, we went to see the Maritime Museum. Prince Frederick's barge:
A turning paddle wheel:
There are two children's areas in the museum, but unfortunately the one with a big play structure was closed. This "children's gallery" was just about as good, though. It contained fun activities but also items exhibited here in their own right, like real cannons and cannonballs and rigging equipment. Our three younger kids were in their element, but the teens enjoyed it too.
There's a ballistics simulator with a cannon you can raise with a crank or turn on a turntable to shoot at a faraway island. If you are 13 and not 3 you can learn from your error and correct the trajectory until you win the game. If you are 3 you can turn a big wheel and make it go "boom."
Extraction from the children's area finally accomplished, we managed to see some other exhibits before moving on. The Nelson exhibit was cooler than I had expected. My favorite part was an interactive screen that showed the ship movements in the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Trafalgar. I am fond of military history and strategy, even though I have nevr had the time to dig into it as much as I would like, and I appreciated being able to step the ship movements forward and backward in time while zooming and rotating the map. Something like that makes it so much easier to see how command decisions interact with the geography and with each other. It is really far better than reading.
Maybe it's actually the geography that interests me. The landforms and waterways we can still see today, and how people moved in them once upon a time. How we have changed the landscape and what the consequences will be. Geography and humans together. Battles are just a very rapid and intense kind of chapter in that same story.
But the technology is part of it too. So battles, writ large, are a story of goals and motivations and planning and strengths versus constraints, costs and benefits. If you forget about the pain and suffering (and the simulator does; but examples of that are in the next case over) it's an engineering problem, or a game. Which way to think about it when? Should it always be both? One or the other? Or neither?
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Through some windows in the Maritime Museum you can see a wide swath of green grass, now littered with leaves from the trees that dot it, criscrossed with walking paths, and sweeping up a high hill. Speaking of battle geography, and having just come from the castle-studded Aosta Valley not long ago it would be entirely unsurprising to my untrained eyes if the top of the hill were crowned by a fortress to watch over the flow of the Thames. But of course the sight of the base of that grassy hill thrills me not because of its military value, but because it is the site of the Observatory.
It is a rather long climb up the hill. Once you are up there it is obvious why the observatory is there. It is the tallest thing around.
The children all had to take selfies at the Prime Meridian.
Then we explored the Observatory itself. Many of the instruments are still in place, including the one that was used to fix the meridian.
We had a moment of sympathy for poor Halley, who had one of the loveliest monuments in Westminster (placed on the occasion of one of the comet transits) but whose meridian, marked at Greenwich by a strip of metal on a wall, didn't win the day. But perhaps we should have more sympathy for the pavement-layers, because the marked meridian is inaccurate too, thanks to imperfections in the plumb-line method given variations in gravity. The GPS-measured prime meridian is about 100 meters away, and as of this writing, still unmarked.
There's a working equatorial telescope (the kind that you can set to compensate for the rotation of the earth so you can take a good photograph of stars). In the winter it's possible to come and look through it on special astronomy nights.
We could have stayed for the next show, perhaps, but Mark had other plans. The Cutty Sark! The tea clipper has been lovingly restored, and its interior is a museum unto itself. With some of the best-designed museum displays, for pure ability to transmit information, that I have seen yet.
London museums have been top-notch in this regard, by the way. Just in the skill with which they display both quantitative and qualitative information. It's all very smartly done.
The Cutty Sark is absolutely worth a go. I liked it far more than I expected I would. Partly because of the ship itself, partly because of the excellent displays. Also because they had very, very good displays and activities for young children in every part of the ship, not just in a dedicated children's gallery. Both my little boys were engaged the whole time. A motorized bench you could sit on to feel the "rocking of the ship;" a game of stacking little weighted cubes, boxes of tea, in the hold without tipping the toy ship mounted on a bearing.
There was another excellent simulator here, of steering a ship from Sydney to London while taking advantage of the trade winds. What I liked about this one was that your display consisted of a world tradewinds map, a closeup of your ship with arrows showing the trade winds in the immediate vicinity, and a compass. No big picture, no GPS dot on the map showing where you are. You have to pay attention and keep track.
Top deck. Part of it was roped off; jumpsuited men and women with badges labeled "Professional Rigger" were working behind the curtain.
Officer's saloon. Note the drink holders that swing freely from the ceiling on either side of the light fixture
Pantry
Mark spent a lot of time admiring the mechanism that converted rotation of the wheel into rotations of the rudder. I was chasing the 3yo at the time and missed most of the explanation from the docent in the cap.
But that was okay, because it gave us something more to talk about over pints of Extra Stout and Double Four Lager and Organic Apricot Fruit Beer after dinner, and a walk along the Strand.
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