A longish drive today – 159 miles from Ashford to Winchester via Portsmouth, mostly along motorways , taking about 4 hours. A long weekend begins today so traffic was fairly heavy later in the day. It never ceases to amaze me how tolerant, patient, polite and kind English motorists are even under these conditions – a very refreshing experience.
We stopped in Portsmouth to have lunch and to see HMS Victory – Horatio Lord Nelson’s flagship at the battle of Trafalgar. The admission included a ferry tour of the harbour, mostly looking at British warships in port – frigates, destroyers and one old Harrier aircraft carrier.
Prominent also was HMS Warrior, the first iron-clad warship built in 1860. It displaces 10,000 tonnes – pretty big.
Touring the famous Victory was a stunning experience, and I have the cut and bumps on my head to prove it. It’s a little easier for shorter people.
We are staying in Easton, a village on the eastern outskirts of Winchester. We did a short walk through the village and were surprised to find that many of the houses were thatched, something fairly new to us.
Today I finally managed to get some half-decent shots of canola fields with their yellow blossoms. As I may have mentioned that, although English roads are generally good, they provide almost no opportunity pull over to look at the scenery. Strange, when there is SO much of it here to see.
Speaking of roads, I find even the twisty bits are easy and safe to navigate. What I mean is no surprises due to tightening radius as you progress through the curve.
Speaking of curves, that reminds me of my early days as a programmer. I was working for the University of Waterloo’s IT department (then called the Computer Centre), and IBM had been kind to them by providing equipment next to gratis. In return they asked for some road design software to be written for their customer. This required being able to configure road curves using a spiral. I used mathematical formulas for spirals given to me by my colleague Ron H. After the software was delivered to the provincial roads department, the engineers there complained that only a mathematician would design a spiral that way; not something a civil engineer would use.