I managed to keep it all under wraps until we actually emerged at Westminster tube, a few more steps bring you down to the waterfront and the piers. It's not much of a surprise from then on :-)
Letting the peons go upstairs to gawk at the scenery in the wind and cold, we took our seats in the (fairly deserted) dining area and sat down to our lunch.
Chicken salad, wine, coffee and cake made a nice accompaniment to the banks of the Thames sliding slowly past. We didn't try to listen to the droning of the tour guide up top, as we had a return ticket, we'd listen to the tour part of the tour on the way back :-)
Journey's end was Greenwich, which I'd visited before but Colleen never had. Luckily the weather was pretty nice, and we wandered around the market and the Queen's house before heading up to the observatory.
We did the whole jumping across the prime meridian thing that everybody does there, then I had a geeky moment and tried to explain how according to WGS84 the dateline was actually some 10's of yards off in the surrounding parklands. To her credit, Colleen didn't just dump me at that point :-)
Here's me 'holding up' the ball that drops daily, to alert the river traffic in the thames exactly when midday is:
We wandered through the museum parts quite quickly, I'd seen it all before and it was rather claustrophobically crowded that day. We walked through to the second museumy bit and checked out the exhibits. Unfortunately the planetarium part was closed so we didn't get to see that. I just leant against the giant 'cone' on the outside of it and posed for some pictures :-)
We had a bit of a 'photo shoot' moment in the park, the ones of me turned out universally un-photogenic, but this one is rather lovely :-)
Back on the boat, we listened to the guided tour, which was so good we felt compelled to drop some money in the bucket (despite having already paid for the cruise!
Soon we were home, tired but happy.
2 comments:
Aw, you are a romantic so-and-so, aren't you!
Sometimes!
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