Golden Hinde trip

Earlier this week we went to London to meet up with a local home ed group that had arranged a tour of the Golden Hinde:

Even though it was a rainy, wet morning, we had a fab time, the tour guide was brilliant.  He told us lots of facts about being a crew member on a ship in Elizabethan times through engaging both children and adults alike with stories of what went on:

George particularly liked the gruesome parts, like the description of keelhauling!  We were interested to hear that walking the plank never happened and that touching wood comes from sailors touching these wooden figure heads on the boat deck for luck:

Needless to say, neither of us fancied the job of crewman, too many pitfalls!  George didn't like the fact that you could die from literally anything, from falling off the mast and drowning in the sea, to getting one of the horrid diseases.  And anyway, the lookout point on the mast is far, far too high up for my liking:

After lunch at Wagamamas,...

...we had the afternoon free, so decided on a walk along the river to look for interesting things.  We had fab conversations about the uses of the river and the boats that we saw going up and down.  Along the way we added to our list of things to do and see in future visits to London when we have more time, like Fleet Street, the monument for the Fire of London, Somerset House, among others.

We spotted this police call box on our travels, which looked like a slimmed down version of the Tardis :-)  We spent a bit of time watching work being done on one of the many bridges that span the Thames:

George loves all things mechanical and likes to work out how things work and how things are made.  He was telling me how he thought the workmen got their equipment over the bridge.  We spent time looking at a First World War memorial further along and he noted that some men had the same surname and wondered if they were of the same family and thought it was sad that families lost more than one person in the war.  We also spotted this building which was interesting as it looked tudor in style:

Its great to walk in London, we do it every time we come and often we do the same walk, but a year or so apart and its amazing what we spot that we didn't on a previous occasion.