Day 7 in England: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich

The teenager woke up fever-free and without a sore throat on this morning, but we decided to have her kick back and hang around the AirBnb for the day just in case. So it was just three intrepid adventurers who attempted to figure out how to get ourselves back and forth to Greenwich by boat. It went... not well.

Here's our day's agenda:

• Thames Clipper to Greenwich
• Royal Observatory
• Greenwich Market
• National Maritime Museum
• Greenwich Foot Tunnel
• Thames Clipper to Battersea Park

In theory, the Thames Clipper Uber Boat is the coolest idea ever. You buy a ticket, hop on the boat, and travel the Thames to your destination. I. Was. STOKED!!!

In actuality, the routes are completely incomprehensible to ascertain, the boats are mostly unlabeled so you can't tell if you're getting on the correct one without asking, and even when we asked, the employees couldn't seem to actually tell us how to actually get on the correct boat for the correct route. It was absolutely miserable. I could have literally walked to and from Greenwich in the time it took us to get to and from Greenwich on this day. 

So what I thought you were supposed to do was check this route map to see what color route you're supposed to take--

--and then cross-reference it with the timetable to see when your boat will arrive:

We wanted to go from Battersea Power Station to Greenwich, so we wanted an RB1, but what I think we ended up getting on was an RB6? Because it dumped all of us off at the Canary Wharf stop and went back the way it came from. So then we had to figure out 1) what our Oyster cards had been charged for that trip, since we'd put money on them specifically for this, 2) if we had enough money on the Oyster cards to continue the trip with a second ticket, because there wasn't a place to top up Oyster cards at the pier, and 3) what freaking boat were we actually supposed to take to finish getting to Greenwich.

If only any, you know, EMPLOYEES had been around to offer assistance! 

We thought about bailing and just riding the Tube out to Greenwich, but damn it, I wanted my boat ride, so we turned to Plan B, generally known as Throw Money at the Problem. Matt got us new paper tickets from the ticket machine, which was a waste of money if our Oyster card tickets were still good, but the advantage was that they at least said which pier we were going to in case we got thrown off the boat early again, and we got back in line to wait for the next random boat that came by going in the proper direction. 

At least the trip was pretty (although--another disappointment--all the seats have a dirty window in between you and the pretty things)!

Fortunately, I don't think there was any way to screw up going east from Canary Wharf to Greenwich (stay tuned for the evening, when we'll screw up our westward trip!), so when we FINALLY got back on a freaking boat, that boat at least took us straight to freaking Greenwich.

From there, it's just a 15-minute walk straight uphill to the Royal Observatory!

There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to see here, but first, we had to see the Main Attraction:

It's the Prime Meridian!

Check me out encompassing ALL the hemispheres!

The rest of the day will consist solely of me finding Prime Meridian markers and insisting on having my photo taken with them.

I thought the historical meridian markers were also interesting. There were several!

Apparently, astronomers spent quite some time dithering about whether the meridian should be here, or perhaps over here five feet to the right, or maybe just scooted over another couple of feet right here. It's like moving a coffee table, only you have to remake all your plaques and inform the entire world that you changed your mind.

I hadn't come to see them, specifically, but I loved the exhibits that showed examples from the history of astronomy. Here are some children's lacing cards from the 1820s, with the lacing holes being the locations of the stars that make up the constellation:

This globe is really cool, too, because the constellations show up as shadows on the wall behind it:

There are also artifacts here from the interesting history of timekeeping and measurement of all kinds. Here's the Time Ball, which still falls exactly at 1:00 pm daily so that ships on the Thames, households across the river, and anyone who happens to be looking in the right direction at the right time can synchronize their clocks:

And yes (because I looked it up), the New Year's Eve ball drop in Times Square DOES trace its history back to this very ball.

The Royal Observatory is on a hill, so check it out--you really can see it from a LONG WAY! Probably not during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and its coal smog, though...

Here's the original entrance, with all the standardized measurements on display for the general public to reference at any time. The clock is especially important, because it reflected the real, actual time from the official timekeeper inside the observatory (there's a replica in the gift shop that I SUPER wanted, but even before I realized that my entire carry-on was going to be full of rocks, I knew I wasn't going to have room in it for a giant analogue clock...):

Oh, look! I found another Prime Meridian marker!

Once upon a time, Matt and I both read and were, for a pretty hot minute, obsessed with Longitude. So when we came upon an entire gallery devoted to chronicling the development of the ability to calculate longitude on ocean voyages, we both went SQUEEEEEE!!!!!

This below work was a star catalogue meant to define positions and orbits so exactly that ships could use it to calculate longitude... if only their ships were sitting on a perfectly flat ocean during a perfectly clear night, of course. It's got a super dishy backstory, though! John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, spent literal decades on his observations, and flat-out refused to publish them until he'd spent further decades refining and correcting. So Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley--as in, THE Isaac Newton and THE Edmund Halley--sneaked into his workplace, stole his documents, and published a pirated version. So then Flamsteed went around and picked up all the pirated copies he could find and destroyed them. This edition is the official one, published posthumously because that was the only way he'd stop messing with it:

Here's one of the timepieces made on the path to an accurate calculation of longitude. It's got dueling pendulums to hopefully counteract ship movement, and a variety of metals to hopefully counteract temperature changes:

It didn't work great.

Here's the real winner!

This watch keeps perfectly accurate time no matter how much it moves, what the temperature is, what the humidity is, or how much salt gets on it. Combine that with an accurate astronomical chart, and you'll never be lost again!

This exhibit below inspired me and Matt to explain to our college kid all about the good old days, when could call Time and Temperature on your landline. 

The teenager thought that this was absurd, and that calling to hear the movie listings and to request songs on the radio sounded equally absurd. But now we know why BBC Radio kept beeping at us every hour!

Found another Prime Meridian marker!

Even though Borough Market had been so crowded we all thought we were going to die it had also been really cool, so after watching the 1:00 Time Ball drop we left the Royal Observatory and walked over to check out Greenwich Market:

I swear to god I could take these two to the pits of hell and they would manage to find a churro stand:

I think the teenager who we'd left at the AirBnb would have liked Greenwich Market a lot, but just between us I'd rather have stayed at the museum and looked at stuff. 

After lunch, we walked over to the National Maritime Museum, where I had several things I wanted to see.

But first, the toddler playground!

They're deliberately ignoring the sign that says that only small children should ride the boats, and I'm pretending I don't know them.

There were so many exhibits that I wanted to see that we ended up just wandering, directionless, through the galleries. Fortunately, we happened upon all of my must-see sites!

This double hull outrigger canoe reminded me of Moana.

It's a real Marshall Islands stick chart!!! We learned about these at the very beginning of my kid's AP Human Geography study, so it was fun to see one in person.

The Atlantic Worlds gallery had an exhibit on Africa that felt kind of sketchy:

I mean, I guess they're not factually incorrect, but it feels very... dispassionate, I guess? Maybe that's my perspective as an American, where we're literally still having to tell people that Black lives literally matter, but I feel like the lede of this intro should have been something like "Enslaving people and trafficking them across the Atlantic, raping, torturing, and murdering them along the way and at their destinations, was all very bad, and we shouldn't have done that."

The exhibit did have a lot of artifacts from the history of African enslavement that I'd never seen before, but they also felt dispassionately presented and I didn't feel comfortable taking pictures. Like, this label shows the most emotion, and even it sounds like they're describing something from another planet:

I did send my teenager this pic of a guillotine used to execute 50+ royalists on a West Indian island, though, because eat the rich:

My obsessive reading of the Aubrey/Maturin novels have given me a taste for the Napoleonic War-era Royal Navy, so I was very stoked when our wanderings finally led us to the gallery I was most excited to see: Nelson, Navy, Nation! I outlasted even my poor college student in this gallery, as not only did I have to look at every single artifact and read its label twice, but then I had to go back and see my favorites a third time, then find something else I hadn't looked at closely enough, and then take another set of photos in case my first three sets hadn't turned out correctly:

Should I get desperately into model shipbuilding? I kind of think I should!

This is the first letter Nelson wrote with his left hand after having his right arm amputated:

Sooo... I know it's a kind of running joke in the Aubrey/Maturin novels, but I did not realize how very, very, very much everyone in England reveres Lord Nelson? They are REALLY into him! It made me realize that I am missing a lot of context for the novels, and a lot of references and imagery is likely passing right over my head. Like, now I think O'Brien is purposefully putting in similarities between Aubrey and Nelson, right?

Anyway, here's the coat Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded. You can see the bullet hole there at his left shoulder:

And here are the underthings he was wearing when he died. All that blood on his stockings belongs to a shipmate, though--he just fell in it:

In the same gallery, here's an unrelated photo of sailors shooting walruses. It was so fun to be in the Navy!

I'm sorry to say that I DID have to be dragged out of that gallery at closing time...

I'd sort of wanted to tour the Cutty Sark, but the ridiculous amount of time it took us to make our way all of the six miles to Greenwich that morning meant that I couldn't work it in, alas. Here it is from the outside, at least!

We were pretty footsore by this time, and we probably could have headed back to my kid and my AirBnb, but I'd seen this place on Tiktok--

--and I could not sleep easy at night until we'd experienced it for ourselves.

So we did!

On the other side of the tunnel, you get a lovely view back to where you came from:

Look VERY closely and you can even see the red ball at the Royal Observatory!

By the time we'd walked back through the tunnel we were EXHAUSTED, which was just the awesomest time to figure out how to get back on my new personal very least favorite mode of transportation ever, the fucking Thames Clipper Uber Boat OMG. If I'd had a brain cell left in my head I would have found a Tube station instead.

Determined that this time we were NOT going to fuck this up, Matt found an actual human to buy our return tickets from, and this human told us which boat to get on. So we got in line for that boat. And then that boat reached capacity, so we all had to walk back up the gangway and get in another line for the next boat... which was not set to arrive for forty freaking minutes. We should have tried to return our boat tickets and found the Tube station. But instead we waited in line, and when an employee came by Matt showed her our tickets, asked her if the next boat was the correct boat for our tickets, and she said it was.

So finally, FINALLY the next boat comes and we all get on it. We get to about here--

--and then the boat stops at Canary FUCKING Wharf AGAIN, dumps us all out AGAIN, and turns around AGAIN, because it was not the right boat.

So, y'all, I feel like a few times on this trip, some random employee deliberately gave us the wrong information, and I feel like they did this because they did not want to have to tell us bad news. Is this a British thing, or an us thing?

At least there were a ton of tourists on this boat, and we were all irritated and tired and confused, so I wasn't the only one not happy when we all got dumped off. There were a LOT of people griping, but the guy emptying the boat kept saying, "The next boat will be here in just a few minutes! Just wait for the next boat; it will be here in a few minutes!"

By "few", he meant forty.

When the next boat finally came, the guy letting us on was bemusedly very patient with me when I stopped the entire line to be all, "Does this boat go to Battersea? This very boat? I'm on the boat that will take me to Battersea?"

And hallelujah, it did!

Fine, it was worth it to be able to go UNDER the Tower Bridge, even if my view of it was through a dirty window.

...and then after all that, and then walking to our bus stop, to get the bus that would let us out a block from our AirBnb, the bus never came. It kept saying it was coming on Google Maps, then it would say it was delayed, then that bus would disappear and Google Maps would start saying the next bus would be here in five minutes, then it would say it was delayed, and so on and so on. We played that out for about 30 minutes before I was finally like, "OMG guys I think we're going to have to walk."

Well, we HAD been living just a few blocks from Battersea Park all week without having stepped into it once, so a mile walk straight through the middle was a least a good chance to take it all in...

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

I Read The Sutton Hoo Story and Pretended it Was About Beowulf

My favorite artifact is Beowulf's helmet!

 My latest Goodreads review is just me fangirling over Sutton Hoo!

The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England by Martin Carver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you followed a rabbit trail from Beowulf or wanted a deep dive after visiting Room 41 in the British Museum, this book is where you want to go next. It's the least dry in-depth book on an archaeological site that you're going to get (yes, it's still a little dry, but you should read the book about Spiro Mounds that I'm currently trying to slog through--it's printed in typewriter font, for pete's sake!), and also the most comprehensive you'll get in under 250 pages, with a history of both the site and its excavations, and discussion of the finds in which they're put in historical and cultural context.

I loved this book so much that I carried it around my house and forced family members to listen to me read random passages out loud to them.

The Anastasius platter, engraved with the name of Roman Emperor Anastasius.

The book’s order is a little confusing at first, although I understand why Carver organized it the way he did. You obviously want to hear the fun story of Sutton Hoo’s “discovery” in 1939 first, and then you might as well continue its history from there so you can cover the other excavations, but when you get to the most recent excavation, to understand the archaeologists’ findings you have to pop back into Anglo-Saxon times and start the history all over again.

Even though I came to the book mostly to learn more about the grave goods, themselves (Beowulf and Room 41 were my gateway archaeological drugs!), I actually found it just as interesting to read about the politics of an archaeological excavation, and fascinating to read about the thoughtful reasoning involved in planning Carver's excavation of the 1980s-1990s. Basically, the idea was to come up with a research question, figure out the absolute minimum amount the site needed to be excavated to answer that question, then excavate only that amount, leaving the rest of the site undisturbed to wait for a future time with better technology and another interesting research question. Seen in this way, the 1939 Basil Brown excavation’s research question was probably something like, “What treasures are inside Mound 2?” I like Martin Carver’s research question of “How did England begin, and what did that society look like?” much better!

You can also see the really great shield in the background. I didn't take a ton of personal photos of the Sutton Hoo artifacts, because you can download high-res images free for personal use from the British Museum's online collection database.

Because I'd expected to slog through a dull tome (looking at you, Spiro Mounds book!), I was even more delighted to find Carver's book full of vivid little details and discoveries that bring the Sutton Hoo site to life. One of my favorite parts of the book is the tiny detail that when the archaeologists studied the site in the 1980s, the mounds were permeated with rabbit warrens--just chock-full of warrens! This led them to speculate that at some prior point, rabbits were probably put there on purpose because the mounds made a favorable habitat, and then the residents could essentially farm them.

You know what that is just exactly like?!? That terrifying chapter of Watership Down when Hazel and Fiver go to live on what is essentially a rabbit commune. There’s tons of food and no predators, and all the rabbits are LOVING it, but all the time Fiver is all, “DAAAAAANGER! I sense danger here!”. And they act like they don’t believe him, but at the same time the rabbits from this warren *are* hella weird, and come to find out a local farmer is feeding them and protecting them and also eating them whenever he’s hungry. JUST LIKE SUTTON HOO!!!

I appreciated having lots of illustrations in the book, although I did often go off-road and look up more info about things that Carver mentioned. He's got a few photos of specific grave goods, for instance, but it's so easy to just pop over to the British Museum's online collection site and pull up a really detailed image of each thing that tbh an in-book photo isn't really necessary. The most helpful and unique illustrations were site maps, line drawings of possible burial scenes (OMG the burial scene of people carrying the coffin of a young man to his open grave, with his perfectly alive bridled horse standing innocently next to a second open grave), and renderings of the excavation. That rendering of all the horrific ways that execution victims were found in their graves, their heads in completely random spots, their legs jacked up all weird, is the stuff of nightmares.

My personal fascination with Sutton Hoo, in particular its grave goods, is because of Beowulf. I'd read before about the tons of connections between Sutton Hoo and Beowulf, and I was thrilled to read Carver also illustrating them in his discussion of the overall historical and cultural context of Sutton Hoo: the time period the poem is set in matches the Sutton Hoo mound burials pretty well, and many of the grave goods found match things mentioned in Beowulf, from the dead king Scyld Scefing’s ship filled with treasure to the fancy horse harnesses to the weaponry. And based on chemical analysis of the soil underneath the spot where the occupant of the ship burial was laid, as well as other clues, the occupant’s age, sex, and clothing seem to match up pretty well with an old Beowulf, dead from the wounds he received while battling a dragon. Another Sutton Hoo mound burial is for a wealthy, high-status woman, Beowulf’s queen if you turn your head just right and squint. Many of the grave goods from the site have wolf imagery, recalling Beowulf’s name (“bee wolf” or “bee hunter,” both a kenning for “bear”). The ship even included a giant cauldron on a giant chain, a chain long enough to hang it from the roof beam of a great mead hall like Heorot…

In my personal Beowulf fandom, then, my headcanon is that THIS is Beowulf’s burial. The book even includes an artist’s representation of the occupant of the ship burial before death, dressed in the clothing he was buried in and carrying the armor he was buried with. That old guy in his red tunic, holding the famous Sutton Hoo helmet in one hand and the famous Sutton Hoo shield in the other?

Y’all, That. Is. BEOWULF!!!

Now future Sutton Hoo archaeologists just need to find his mead hall…

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Okay, now a little blog-only bonus content

Zoom Interview: This book is plenty to give you a good understanding of Sutton Hoo’s history and archaeology, but you know I love myself a deep dive, so over the weekend I basically roamed around the house until I convinced Matt that he both wanted to play his video game AND watch this Zoom interview with Martin Carver with me on my laptop:

He gave that about half an hour, and then I roamed around some more until I convinced my college student that she wanted to read the book she was already reading AND also finish the interview with me. 

Fun fact based on this Zoom interview: Martin Carver and I have the exact same fold-out illustrated Bayeux Tapestry print! His is mounted on his wall, but I keep mine on my bookshelves so I can unfold it on the floor and peer nearsightedly at all the details.

Martin Carver's Excavation Overview: If you’re as interested in deep dives as I am, Martin Carver also wrote a breakdown of each time that Sutton Hoo has been excavated (including treasure-hunting from the 1600s), and what each excavation did well, did poorly, and discovered. It's a couple hundred pages shorter than The Sutton Hoo Story, so it's a good quick summary with some fun details included.

The Million Pound Grave: Carver referenced this 1965 BBC documentary numerous times, and I used all my Google karma trying to locate it, but all I could find was this widely distributed clip that has done nothing but whet my interest:

Phillips Tell-All Memoir: In Carver's book, he also references a memoir by Phillips, the eventual head archaeologist of the 1939 excavation. He said that Phillips had withheld publication until his own death, but that it was available in some online archaeological database. I went there to find it, and OOOOH is it gossipy!!! In it, you can learn which museum curator Phillips thinks is incompetent, as well as which artist is an alcoholic. He low-key accuses Mrs. Pretty’s sister-in-law of trying to get her to keep the treasure so she can have the jewelry, and he definitely thinks that Mrs. Pretty’s spiritualist is telling her what to do on a general basis. He tells a few more vivid and adorable anecdotes, and his memoir isn’t long, so I think it’s a must-read companion piece.

Virtual Tour: There's a Google Street-View tour of the Sutton Hoo exhibit, but you can't zoom in well enough to read the labels so it's only okay.

More To Read: Let's keep these deep dive vibes going, shall we?

I Read The Sun and the Star Because I Am a Percy Jackson Fangirl Completionist

My college student got me back into Goodreads, so here's my first Goodreads review in seven years! True to form, my inaugural review post hiatus is a middle-grade Greek mythology fanfic...

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The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So, first off:

Did I love this book? No.

Is this book my least favorite from the Percy Jackson universe? Yes.

Will I ever give any book from the Percy Jackson universe less than five stars? No. No, I will not. I am ride or die, for better or worse, in sickness and health, forever and ever amen on the Percy Jackson train. I love all my children equally, even if some of them are better than others (*cough, cough* Trials of Apollo *cough*).

To be honest, this might be the first of the Percy Jackson books that I'm just too old to appreciate. I remember being a fifteen-year-old who got endless enjoyment from harping on and on about my relationships and doing all that self-reflection and feeling like my dreams really meant something, you know? So I would not be surprised if the genuine fifteen-year-olds in the Percy Jackson fandom absolutely eat all of Nico's and Will's relationship talk and relationship thoughts and relationship doubts and the sharing of gentle kisses up. And good for them! Teenagers who don't introspect probably grow up into adults who take Fox News at face value. But personally, I kind of wanted a little more hijinks and lighthearted adventure--some dam plot fluff, shall we say. But when you're slogging your way through Tartarus, your boyfriend slowly dying at your side, I guess you're not really in the mood for middle-grade puns, alas.

I do have some things that I love about the book, of course, other than the simple fact that it belongs to one of my favorite nostalgia fandoms. I grew up in the 80s, where shit was fraught unless you were heteronormative and cisgender, and I'm just so happy for kids these days that I can't even stand it. The entire Percy Jackson series, the thoughtful character depictions, and the existence of Nico and Will would have changed my life for the better if I'd had it as a kid.

I also was definitely a neurospicy kid unsuccessfully masking as a quiet, bookish nerd, and the 12-year-old me who read the entirety of Bullfinch's mythology on a school trip one summer instead of interacting with my peers would have been all over the Greek mythology deep cuts in these books. Greek mythology is one of my Special Interests as an adult to a large part because of the Percy Jackson series, and in every book it tickles me all over again to discover new, obscure characters. This book's favorites include, but are not limited to, Amphithemis and the cacodemons. Poor Amphithemis hurts my heart!

 

Ultimately, I'll take any excuse to live a while longer in the Percy Jackson universe. I'd watch Percy Jackson study to lo-fi hip-hop radio, have a Calypso Castaway screensaver, wear my Camp Half Blood pajamas while eating Camp Half Blood cereal and watching a high school production of the Percy Jackson musical, just to be in that world some more. So even though this isn't the best of the Percy Jackson books, it IS a Percy Jackson book, and it was an excellent way to spend a few hours on a rainy summer day.

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P.S. If you've got a kid who's into Percy Jackson, here are some epic ways to celebrate that love while offering some stellar (and sneaky!) academic enrichment:

• Study and sit for the National Mythology Exam. It's offered for most grade levels and is a great way to inspire an overall love of Greek mythology while building geographic and historical context, increasing reading comprehension skills, and practicing taking a standardized test.
• Host a Percy Jackson party. Take a day trip to Camp Half Blood to play games and earn badges while being creative, building language arts skills, and getting some healthy outdoor exercise.
• Travel. We don't travel internationally often, but Greece was a bucket list trip that we saved up for so that all of us, but especially the kid who's Percy Jackson's biggest fan, could see the real places written about in the myths. We made all kinds of places real there, from Olympus to Delphi to the place where the Athena Parthenos once stood (see The Mark of Athena for more details). Don't have room in your schedule for a trip to Greece right this minute? Find Greek art--and more contemporary art with mythological subjects--in most art museums.

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Here's Every National Park Junior Ranger Badge Kids Can Earn On-Site or By Mail (Updated August 2024)

August 2024: I corrected some links, marked through some sites that no longer allow mail-in badges, and added some new mail-in badges to my list.

July 2023: I crossed out several Junior Ranger badges that are no longer available to earn by mail, but fortunately I also added a few new ones, too, and I updated my map with new Junior Ranger badges that kids can earn on-site.

Find my original post, with a map of every national park site hosting a Junior Ranger program, and a list of every national park site that allows you to earn the Junior Ranger badge by mail (or sometimes even online!) HERE!!!!!!!

P.S. Want more obsessively-compiled lists of resources and activities for kiddos and the people who want to keep them happy and engaged? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!