Heading for London via Bletchley park

From Oxford we follow the wartime path of many an Oxford graduate and head for Bletchley park.

The exhibits in Bletchley mansion and the huts do a good job of evoking some of the sights and sounds of the place in the war era and there are a. Number of accounts from people who worked there during the war included in the audio guide.

Volunteers have reconstructed one of the "bomb" machines based on plans and fragments and run demonstrations of it cracking a code. The story of Alan Turing that emerges is naturally a little different from the movie plot - although the ending for him after the war is sadly accurate.

We spend a couple of happy hours pottering around and gathering all kinds of tidbits of knowledge before it is time to hit the road to the capital.

After experiencing the weird and wonderful roads and crazy amounts of traffic of the U.K., we have abandoned plan A - which was to drive to our hotel in Bayswater and drop off our luggage and then drop the car at Heathrow and are opting instead to drop the car at Heathrow and use the Heathrow express to get close enough to drag the luggage to the hotel.

The journey is a little complicated by rain. If the Eskimo have 50 words for snow, I feel that that there should be more words in English to cover all the different types of rain that they experience in England. Today we start with "mysfall" - rain that you can SEE falling - but is not really heavy enough for an umbrella. This moves on to "plinking" - rain that would make a "plinking" sound if it fell into a bucket of water. As we hit the ring road around London this changes to "fogdrop" rain which is sufficiently heavy to creat a fog effect behind it - making it difficult to see.

Anyway - enough of my musings on rain. The sad fact is that it makes navigation into town even more tricky because it is hard to spot the road signs early enough.

Fortunately it all goes to plan. The Heathrow express is pricey - but very efficient. The walk from Paddington station to our accommodation in Bayswater is long - but we make it. And as we arrive between 5 and 6 we all agree that walking is preferable to trying to cram ourselves into the tube.

It feels odd not to have the big black Merc in our lives any more - but Grant is definitely relieved not to have to do any more driving!