Friday, July 26, 2013

Friday, July 26, 2013

Tonight's picture was taken on July 25, 2008, two days after Mattie was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma. As you can see we had Christmas candy cane lights out on our deck. Mind you it was July!!! But this was Mattie's request! He wanted to see lights. He really couldn't articulate why he wanted us to take out the lights from storage and decorate outside, but I suspect decorating with lights was one of the many things he enjoyed doing with Peter. It was their tradition together every November (the day after Thanksgiving to be specific!). Also seeing lights has a way of brightening up our world on dark days. So on some level Mattie understood the grimness of his diagnosis which was amazing considering he was only six years old!


Fact of the Day: Titanic departed from Southampton, England just before noon on April 10, 1912; Captain Edward John Smith steered the ship towards the first port of Cherbourg, France that was about 70 miles away. After its second stop in Queenstown, Ireland, the Titanic set out for New York City, but after approximately 375 miles of travel, sunk on April 14, 1912.

Today we took a 30 minute taxi drive to Portsmouth, England. Portsmouth is the second largest city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire on the south coast of England. Portsmouth is notable for being the United Kingdom's only island city; it is located mainly on Portsea Island. It is situated 64 miles south west from London and 19 miles south east of Southampton.

As a significant naval port for centuries, Portsmouth is home to the world's oldest dry dock still in use and also home to some famous ships, including HMS Warrior, the Tudor carrack Mary Rose and Lord Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory. Although smaller than in its heyday, the naval base remains a major dockyard and base for the Royal Navy and Royal Marine Commandos whose Headquarters resides there. There is also a thriving commercial ferryport serving destinations on the continent for freight and passenger traffic.

We walked to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and came across a statue of a man with his dog. I must admit the dog caught my attention! The British love their animals and it is NOT unusual to see statues of famous individuals with their dogs!!! This was Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Captain Scott was a Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery Expedition, 1901–04, and the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition, 1910–13. During this second venture, Scott led a party of five which reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to find that they had been preceded by Roald Amundsen's Norwegian  expedition. On their return journey, Scott and his four comrades all died from a combination of exhaustion, starvation and extreme cold.

The plaque under Captain Robert Falcon Scott's statue caught our attention. It read...... Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Royal Navy
Born 6 June 1868 died about 29 March 1912. During his return from the South Pole in his journal found 8 months later he wrote the gale is howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult but for my own sake I do not regret this journey which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks we knew, we took them. Things have come out against us and therefore we have no cause for complaint by bow to the will of providence determined to do our best to the end.  

Right next to the statue was an entrance into Porter's garden. In the garden were beautiful cherry trees (with fruit on them!!!) as well as these great big giant thistle flowers. Peter and I LOVE the thistle, because it reminds us of our honeymoon trip to Britain (in particular Scotland, where we first saw our first thistle).

The garden also featured Lavender. It was incredibly fragrant and filled with bees!

There is nothing quite like an English garden. They just have an absolute understanding for flowers, composition, and scale. 

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard has 800 years of history and encompasses the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Action Stations and Harbour Tours.

Situated within a working Naval Base, the Historic Dockyard is the only place in the world to see the Royal Navy past, present and future.

Within the Dockyard sits the HMS Victory. The Victory is a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, laid down in 1759 and launched in 1765. She is most famous as Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar  (Britain's greatest naval victory) in 1805.

Also in the dockyard is the HMS Warrior. She is an armored frigate built for the Royal Navy in 1859–61. She and her sister ship HMS Black Prince were the first armor-plated, iron-hulled warships; they were built in response to the first ironclad ocean-going warship, the wooden-hulled French ironclad Gloire, launched in 1859. Warrior made a publicity tour of Great Britain in 1863 and spent her active career with the Channel Squadron (She never fired a shot in anger, yet changed naval warfare forever!). The ship was paid off in 1883 after having been in 1st class reserve since 1875. She served as a store ship and depot ship before she was assigned to the Royal Navy's torpedo training school in 1904. The ship was converted into a floating oil jetty in 1927 and remained in that role until 1979 when her eight-year restoration began. Listed as part of the National Historic Fleet, Warrior has been a museum ship in Portsmouth since 1987.

The third famous vessel sitting in dry dock in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is the HMS M33. M33 is an M29-class monitor of the Royal Navy built in 1915. She saw active service in the Mediterranean during World War I and in Russia during the Allied Intervention in 1919. She was used subsequently as a mine-laying training ship, fueling hulk, boom defense workshop and floating office, being renamed  HMS Minerva and Hulk C23 during her long life. She passed to Hampshire County Council in the 1980s and was restored to original condition and is now located at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. She is one of only three surviving Royal Navy warships of the First World War.

Within the Dockyard complex, a new museum is currently being built. A museum that will tell history through personal stories. Which for a person like myself, this is the best way for me to learn and remember history. This museum opens in 2014, however, outside of the complex where the museum is being built are promotional posters. This is one that caught my attention. Why? Because of Scatters the Cat!!! The poster reads..... "Scatters, the pet cat of the battleship HMS Dreadnought."

After touring around, we walked to the Gunwharf Quays (Quays is pronounced KEYS) Marina. While at the marina, we heard incredible live music being performed by the Royal Marines Band Service. This Band is famed throughout the world for their immaculate appearance, drill and musicianship, the bandsmen and women of the five Royal Marine bands combine military precision and discipline with an artistic interpretation that places them in the top level of musical ensembles.

This was my view at lunch!!! Gunwharf Quays was an important part of the Portsmouth Naval dockyard in the days of sailing ships. Sailing ships required periodic checking and maintenance (and often repair after a naval battle). This often necessitated the ship being placed into a dry dock. However, a ship could not be placed in dry dock with its guns on board as the weight would severely damage the wooden structure once the support of the sea water was lost and the keel took all the weight of the ship and its contents. The ship would offload all of its guns at one of the Gunwharf Quays before being dry docked. As ships and armaments developed, the requirement to offload the armament diminished, and the Gunwharf Quays fell into disuse. On February 28, 2001, the Gunwharf Quays was developed and transformed into an open air complex filled with shops and restaurants.  

Along our walk through the streets of Portsmouth, we were greeted by wonderful English architecture... famous for their decorative half timbers!!! No building is complete without flowers either.

It would be impossible to miss this tower, which is incorporated in Portsmouth's skyline! Spinnaker Tower is a 560 ft landmark tower in Portsmouth. It is the centerpiece of the redevelopment of Portsmouth Harbor. The tower, is the tallest accessible structure in the United Kingdom outside London. The tower is visible for miles around Portsmouth, changing the horizon of the area. The tower represents sails billowing in the wind, a design accomplished using two large, white, sweeping steel arcs, which give the tower its spinnaker sail design. 


Though we are all a bit jet lagged and frankly I still don't know what day or time it is, we accomplished a lot today. Tomorrow we board our cruise ship. However, as is typical for us, we never have an uneventful day. Actually I would describe the taxi ride from Portsmouth back to Southampton as harrowing or down right frightening. I would say about five minutes into the drive, I realized that the driver was unstable mentally. He was talking to himself, not in touch with reality, and would only drive 35mph on a fast moving highway. There were many other oddities. So much so that Peter was tracking him with his GPS app on his i-phone and Peter and I were text messaging back and forth in the taxi, because we felt we needed a plan on how to manage this horrific car trip. Thankfully we arrived back safely and I consider that no short of a miracle.