Rawr! WordPress!

The WordPress app on Edward is being extraordinarily uncooperative, so I’ve no idea when I’ll actually get this posted (right now it’s Thursday, February 12), but I thought I’d go ahead and tell you about today now, just in case…

Today was mostly a travel day. Claire, Stephen the Hire Car, and I left Portsmouth this morning to meet some family friends of hers on our way to Hay-on-Wye (in Tetbury for lunch at the awesomely named Snooty Fox). My navigation skills were in fine form and we managed to arrive without getting lost. Huzzah!

Let me just say now that navigating in the UK is an entirely different game to navigating in the States. Things are on such a smaller scale here and road signs and exits and turns come at you much more quickly. In the States, navigating basically goes like this:

Navigator: Okay, we’re on this road for three days and then we make a right.

Driver: *drives*

In the UK, it’s more like:

Navigator: Okay, the next road we’re looking for is the–

Driver: That was junction 12, did we want junction 12?

Navigator: Let me just find that on the–

Driver: Were we supposed to turn there? The sign said we were supposed to turn there.

Navigator: What town was it? Was it–?

Driver: Do we want to go left? I think that goes back to where we were, but I thought I saw a sign…

Navigator: Wait, can we just turn around so we can get our bearings?

Russian customs official: Passports, please.

Thankfully, Claire and I did not end up in Russia, but we’re not done with all our driving yet… We did, however, end up in Hay-on-Wye and, after some slight wandering through perhaps the worst sign-posted town in Wales, at our B&B. All the shops were closed so we had a nice dinner to gather our strength for tomorrow!

Please mind your head!

Today (actually the day before the day before yesterday now because WordPress has not been cooperating) we took the ferry into Portsmouth from Gosport to see all the historical ships docked there.

First up was the Mary Rose which was a Tudor warship that was sunk in…well, I don’t remember exactly, but, at any rate, it sat at the bottom of the bay around here for four hundred years or so until it was discovered and raised in the 1980s. Apparently the half that sank into the silt was very well preserved and and that’s what they painstakingly dug out in the 80s. A lot of artifacts from the sailors were also preserved – including English long bows and a long-lost musical instrument (some kind of shawn) – so it’s provided lots of information about Tudor life in general as well as onboard a ship.

Then we had a tour of the HMS Victory which was Admiral Nelson’s ship until he was killed at Trafalgar. I was definitely not made for a sailor’s life, being far too tall to fit belowdecks. Claire, however, has decided to run away and join the navy (see picture).

Then we went to dinner and guess what we stumbled across! See picture!