Madison Across the Pond: Day 11: Greenwich and Boats

Although England has various forms of transportation (the Tube, trains, double-decker buses, river boats, etc.) not surprisingly, our main form of transportation has been our feet. A couple of students have been keeping track of approximately how far we've been walking each day and we've manage to average out to anywhere between 6-8 miles a day, typically closer to 8. This probably explains why I managed to get sunburn... Who gets sunburn in a country where it rains almost every day??? That's some cruel irony if I've ever seen it.

Today, we took our first ride on a double-decker bus. Unfortunately, the open top buses you always see in the movies are for organized tours only. I was a little disappointed to discover that the public transit buses all have closed roofs, but it was still exciting to do. We were taking a bus to a dock on the River Thames where we would hop on a river bus to Greenwich.

Greenwich has a rich history with attractions such as the Palace Placetia where many Tudors where born, including Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the National Maritime Museum, and the Cutty Sark. We were able to go aboard the Cutty Sark, which is now a museum, but used to be a British clipper ship that transported tea. In addition, one of the attractions I really wanted to visit while we were in Greenwich was the Royal Observatory to stand on the Prime Meridian. However, once we walked up a very large hill in order to get to the observatory, we discovered that it had already closed. We joked about hopping the fence because we could see the Prime Meridian from behind the locked gate, but we figured breaking the law in a foreign country would be a poor decision for a few visiting Americans. Since the Prime Meridian is one line that runs around the circumference of the world, we eventually found where the Meridian comes out of the boundaries of the observatory to where we could actually stand on it. After trekking up and down that large hill, we were all pretty exhausted and decided to take the river boat back across the river.