Friday, August 15, 2014

Cambridge at a low ebb


I woke up feeling somewhat less than 100%, which was more than a little disappointing as I had a big day planned in a town with a lot of places to go. But my first destination was the tourist information centre where I'd be joining a walking tour (the one that I hadn't gone on the previous day because it had already sold out) that would take me around and into what I hoped would be some interesting parts of town.

Oh, but before that I had to deal with a minor crisis, the problem of laundry. The single most significant lesson I've learned about travelling is that you need to plan around when you're going to need to get yourself to a laundromat (or, as they call them in the UK, a launderette) or locate someone who'll do it for you. I'd made it through London without having to do any - a blessing, because the prices for the in-house service at the hotel were staggering) and done some myself in Oxford; this time I'd located a service, so that's where I went, mostly because I didn't want to have to try and collect the volume of one pound coins I'd have needed to do it myself.

So, once that was done I was off into town.

The tour took as past Alice Bell & Charles Todd's house - he named Alice Springs for her and the Todd River is named after him. Corpus Christi college and Saint Botolph's church. The old Cavendish laboratory. The Eagle - the pub where Crick & Watson announced they'd discovered DNA. We went inside Queens' College, which is very picturesque. The mathematical bridge and the Corpus clock. Then past the front of Gonville & Caius college and Clare College.

The River Cam runs through the middle of town and people punt up and down it. You can hire punts to go do it yourself but I wasn't feeling energetic enough; there are bigger ones with for groups but the spruikers are so numerous and intrusive that I found it off-putting and chose to not bother.
































Oh, and Queens' has a boar symbol on its walls, meaning our old friend Richard III had done something nice for them at some time.



The tour finished inside King's College Chapel, which is yet another astonishing building, hundreds of years in the construction. I took a few pictures.














I was feeling a little less energetic, but I moved onto my next destination: the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. It is, as the title suggests, a museum of science - specifically, scientific instruments. They have a huge collection of historical devices for measuring all sorts of things. One of Charles Darwin's microscopes is there.

After that my lurgee got the better of me, and I was left with only enough energy to wander around and look at interesting buildings for a while; I then kicked back in some parklands and read my book for about an hour or so, which took me to near enough to dinner time that I found myself a likely looking pub to have dinner (and a pint - of course). After that I caught a bus back to the hotel to get a (relatively) early night.

More pictures!
















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