A navel voyage to Greenwich

It was a beautiful (warmish) summer day, and Tony and I decided to head off to Greenwich, which is a burrough in south east london. We took the boat transport to get there so that we could enjoy the water approach.








Our guide as usual was our beloved Rick Steves' London book.








The boat ride on the Thames was beautiful and there are so many interesting buildings to see along the way - from the old London Tower Bridge to the ultramodern buildings of Canary Wharf.



Greenwich has a long history in relation to Britain's naval history and world exploration. We arrived at the palace boat dock and made our way to the British Naval Museum.





The museum is beautiful, and while we were there, it was having an exhibit of turn of the century model boats. They were actually my favorite items at the museum. They supposedly also have one of the few remaining, unused Titanic tickets. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find it.




From there, we walked up through Greenwich Park, which is where some of the equestrian events for the Olympics will be held, to the Royal Greenwich Observatory.








Here, by careful charting of the stars and timing their occurance over the observatory, the English were able to successfully chart East West locations for their ships at sea. This resulted in the Greenwich Mean Time and is the location for the 0 Longitude line that we still use today.

There is a large red ball on the top of a building that is visible all the way down to the port, and this ball would drop at exactly 1pm each day so that the captains of the sea going vessels could synchronize their ship clocks to Greenwich time. They could then track an offset in time of when a star system would pass over their ship, and by calculating 15 miles a minute to the time that same star system was recorded as having passed over Greenwich, they could then calculate how far east or west of the Greenwich 0 Longitude line they were.






A very ingenious solution for its time. And they still drop the ball to this day at 1pm.

There is also a line in the ground that separates the Western and Eastern hemispheres, and we had to get our picture straddling it.






Greenwich is a lovely little village like section of London, and it makes for a fantastic summer outing on a sunny day. I will definitely come back here again.