The Lutchers in London: History in the Harbour

Jodi and I aren't big on holidays. Well, I'm not big on holidays so Jodi is only big on a few. Mainly Christmas. Anyway, Valentine's Day, being a holiday, was all but ignored. We made (Jodi made) eggs Benedict which apparently has to be capitalized that way and it was delicious. End of blog-safe celebration. Most of the Boundless 8 came over for dinner and desserts which turned into mostly dessert and watching Hercules. No selfie came of this party, though.

Last week was fairly normal until Friday, when Jodi and I took the day off. We spent the morning cleaning and packing for a weekend holiday to Fareham and Portsmouth with Alexa. We have mutual friends, the Malletts who live in the Portsmouth and they had offered for us to stay at their house while we were living in England so this weekend we took advantage of the offer. We went to the UK's TYB/TYC (Territorial Youth Band & Choir) concert in Bournemouth which was very good but made me miss performing with the territorial groups from the West. It made for a late night but we were on holiday so we didn't really care.

On Saturday we went on a Portsmouth tourism extravaganza. We started with local sights near Fareham- Titchfield Abbey, St. Peter's Church, and the coast. The first walls of the church were built in 680. I didn't forget a digit there. 680. As in a millennium before our country's founders were born. It has since been expanded and modified several times over the last 1335 years but I was still severely impressed. Even Titchfield Abbey, the newer of the two structures, was built almost 800 years ago!

After a quick lunch at the Malletts we headed to Portsmouth for more history. I'm usually a selective and somewhat ambiguous history buff- there are random things I'm interested in like medieval architecture, pirates, and renaissance era ships but I don't actually know much about any of them. We first visited the Mary Rose museum, which is a huge black structure with bits of a ship inside it. At least, that's what I was expecting. The Mary Rose was brought to the surface in 1982 and was a pivotal discovery in the realm of naval artifacts and culture. There was a lot discovered from what was under the ship that I always thought has been common knowledge since the 1700s but has actually only been known for the last 30 years. The way the museum is set up is also quite impressive. The inside is shaped and formatted like the decks of the original ship and parallel the parts that were brought up from the excavation. There are windows on one side showing the ship and artifacts on the other in places they would likely be placed when the ship was in use. There were also recreations of crew members based on bones and clothes found inside which gives a unique perspective into life on a 16th century warship. Check out the wikipedia page. It's legit.

On Sunday we went to Portsmouth Citadel and had a lovely roast dinner with the Malletts and one of their daughter's family. We're always down for roast dinner. As if our Sunday couldn't be any more British, we watched two football games and lazily lounged until it was time to head back to the train station. We learned that Sunday trains back to London are ridiculously busy and may not even have seats available. Usually on commuter trains this is fine but we were 90 minutes from London so we ended up walking pretty far down the train before we found suitable seats. We took the tube from Waterloo to Elephant & Castle only to discover there was no rail service from that station and the bus was our only alternative. After an annoyingly long bus ride we finally made it home happily enough.