Essexgirl goes to Greenwich

Ratboy and I said we were going to do some sightseeing in London on Sunday, but couldn't get up much enthusiasm for anything, so headed off to Greenwich at about 1.30pm in the car (saved us half an hour). We parked near Island Gardens and walked through the Thames Path tunnel which is 1200 feet long and varying depths under sea level depending on the tide to Greenwich. We came up right by the Cutty Sark, but didn't visit it as it was very busy with people making the last of the decent weather, plus about two thousand people walking for Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

We detoured into Greenwich market, mainly second hand stuff - clothes, records, assorted bric-a-brac. We didn't see very much original crafts stuff as we expected, maybe we weren't looking in the right part. We then followed the crowd into the park and up the hill where we went into the Royal Observatory. We didn't fancy queueing to take our photos on the meridian line with millions of Japanese people with 14 cameras each, so we went on to look at the camera obscura which was a more of an advanced version of the pinhole camera you made at school, and we got to see people walking past Queen's House at the bottom of the hill. We also had a look around the small museum, which was also free.

We walked down the hill and went into the National Maritime Museum, another free attraction in London that is very well maintained and up to date. We decided not to do the Nelson & Napoleon exhibition at £9.00 each. Ratboy was feeling the effects of a heavy week, so we just had a short look around, but found the exhibitions of Explorers and Passengers very interesting before walking back through the tunnel to the car.