Happy Wednesday bookish people! I’m back with another Where’d I leave it Wednesday and today’s story comes from this past weekend when I went up to Hampshire to visit some relatives. On the day after we travelled up we went to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard – which I really enjoyed by the way and this is some of the things that happened along the way.
The day started off early. I had barely slept the night before, I was in a hotel and I rarely sleep the first night in a hotel anyway but that night there were trains passing by constantly, there was a nearby clock tower going off every hour and my Father’s snoring was louder than a school fire alarm. So I was running on about two hours of sleep and I was in the shower just after six in the morning. We had a breakfast delivered to our hotel door, there was a pot of fruit, a pastry and a yoghurt with a bottle of orange juice.
By half past nine we had met my great aunt and her husband at the train station and so commenced an hours trip to the dockyard. It went faster than I thought, usually on trains I read but there wasn’t enough room so I ended up looking outside the window at all the blurring colours. It looked like a watercolour painting.
When we got to the Dockyard we sat for a a moment to get ourselves comfortable again after the train trip and had a delicious cup of coffee. I am biased, I like coffee even though I shouldn’t drink it for a few reasons. Then the day properly began. While having our drinks out of the window we could see the masts of a huge ship, it turned out to be HMS Warrior.
My journey on this ship began uphill, literally I had to walk up a steep ramp to get onto the ship. The ship had been kept pretty much as it had been when it was being used – or so the men walking around told us. It was very interesting to see the difference between how the sailors and the officers would eat, sleep and generally live. The men on board, telling us about the history of the ship, was dressed how the sailors would have been at the time which added to the whole effect of being on the ship.
The problem with the ship was the rope ladders. If you’ve ever been on this ship, or one similar, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Small wooden steps that you have to climb down one foot at a time with your feet turned sideways, instead of banisters there is rope that swings and moves all over the place as you climb down them. There were many sets of these stairs and they just kept going further down into the ship. It was down near the bottom where I slipped. My foot didn’t get a good enough grip and it fell off the step, I only stayed on the ladder because I gripped so hard to the rope on the side. It shook me up quite a lot. I was happy to climb back out of that ship pretty soon after.
After that we went to the Mary Rose exhibition and I made a friend in Henry VIII… but you’ll have to check back next Wednesday for that story.
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