Bristol

We left Paddington Station (after taking photos with the bronze statue of Paddington Bear) for a two hour train ride to Bristol (115 miles west of London) early Friday morning. Upon arriving we walked to the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, spent two hours inside perusing and then walked down to the Avon River and boarded a canal boat for a two hour tour of the city from the water. We docked just in front of the ss Great Britain and the replica of the Matthew, touring both ships and the museum. The ss (steam ship) Great Britain was the world’s first iron hulled, steam powered ocean liner. After serving for 92 years it was abandoned in the Falklands and was just recently brought back to Bristol and restored. She appears to be floating, but the water around her is actually just resting in a glass pool, so you can climb down underneath the pool and see the hull and propeller. The Matthew, in comparison, is incredibly small. It’s hard to imagine how all 15 sailors crowed on deck with John Cabot as they traversed the Atlantic Ocean and discovered Newfoundland (1497). Next we walked to St. Mary Radcliffe, a gorgeous gothic church which Queen Elizabeth I called “the goodliest, fairest and most famous parish church in England” (I especially appreciated the wood carving of Queen Elizabeth I from the 1600s inside), and after that we walked to Queen’s Square and sat outside a pub there and drank our Pimm’s while we waited for the train to take us back to London!

Photographs: to be posted soon