After completing repairs in Treguier, we sailed overnight across the English Channel to the port city, Falmouth. Located in the southwestern part of England, it sets us up well for our next passage, which will hopefully be to the island of Madeira.
While waiting for a weather window to sail to Madeira, we went on a trip to London. We packed in as many museums and sights as we could in two and a half days. My highlight was seeing a production of Les Miserables. Porter will write a blog about that and I will write about another highlight, the London Eye.
The London Eye is an enormous ferris wheel. When I say enormous, I mean 443 feet high. That height is probably difficult to comprehend; the diameter is nearly one and a half American football fields high. It looks like an extra large bicycle wheel, spinning next to the Thames River. The Eye has thirty-two oval capsules, each one glass on all sides. This gave us great visibility all around.
This is the London Eye a few hours before we rode it, still in the day time.
We got on in the evening, so it was dark out. The Eye is like a ski gondola in that it does not stop for you to board. Instead, it moves slowly and continuously, taking 30 minutes to complete the circle. We started to rise, ever so slowly, my excitement mounting. The Eye lifted us higher and higher above the city, showing us how sprawling London is. Big Ben, the tall clock tower on the Parliament building, looked like a toy as we neared the top. I felt very lucky indeed when our capsule stopped at the top for a couple of minutes, presumably to allow a person on a wheelchair to board the capsule at the bottom.
On our way down, we had a good view of Big Ben, now in the background
Here is Porter by the window of the capsule, as we near the top.
Lookin' cool with our glasses for the 4D movie experience, after our ride.
The London Eye was surprisingly fun for a large, slow, ferris wheel. It was cool to see a night time city from above; seeing it made me want to be a bird. The London Eye was worth every penny. (This is not saying much, due to the fact that I did not pay, and we are in the U.K. where they use pence rather than pennies anyway.) -JackRabbit
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