DAY-18: The Royal Navy At Portsmouth (Sat, Sep 9, 2017)

DAY-18: The Royal Navy At Portsmouth

Day – 18: Saturday, September 9, 2017

Starting Location: Portsmouth, England, UK

Ending Location: Heathrow Airport, London, England, UK

Our trip to Portsmouth was basically for one purpose. I had wanted to see the HMS Victory and the place where Admiral Lord Nelson had fallen at Trafalgar in 1805. 

After breakfast at the hotel we traveled downtown into the naval historic district. We bought day tickets for all of the attractions. As timing would be we were adjacent to the harbor boat cruise just minutes before its departure at noon so we hopped aboard and had a 40-minute guided tour of the harbor. The tour basically goes along the naval base waterfront before turning back for the dock.

 Here's a sign of the times.

The tour took us past England's newest aircraft carrier the Queen Elizabeth. The ship will be the largest ever built for the British Navy but though it sits at the dock looking ready for service it is in fact several years away from commissioning and entering fleet service becoming the HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Queen Elizabeth

The tour guide also pointed out commercial docks including the banana docks where refrigerated ships bring in fruits from around the world. As it was a weekend the harbor was loaded with recreational boaters including a large number of sail boats, some of which were engaged in racing.

After the boat tour we headed for the HMS Victory, a ship built in 1767 and still in commission to this day, similar to the USS Constitution in Boston. The Victory is massive reportedly requiring 6,000 trees to be cut and hewn for it's structural timbers and masts. We boarded the ship and traveled along its many decks including the gun decks and the living quarters of both the ship's captain and Admiral Nelson's as well. 

From the stern cabin windows of the oldest ship one could see the Royal Navy's newest ship in the distance, only a couple of hundreds yards away but spanning 250 years of history and technology. 

The spot on deck where Nelson was mortally wounded is identified by a brass placard for all to see. 

The Victory continues to go through renovation and will likely in the next several years be remasted, this time with carbon fiber copies of the the huge timbers of the past.

After the Victory we quickly went through the exhibit for the Mary Rose. This ship was one of King Henry VIII's largest gunships but was sunk in a battle with the French in the mid 16th century. The hull of the Mary Rose was re-discovered in 1971 and after a painstaking salvage operation the remnants of the hull were restored for public view. Only about half of the ship was recovered, specifically the half that was buried in the mud and muck of where it sank, the other half that was exposed to water over the almost 400 hundred years had been lost to typical deterioration.

With the primary objectives achieved we moved on departing Portsmouth heading north toward London's Heathrow Airport where would be staying off and on for the next several days at the Hilton Garden Inn.

We arrived around 5 PM and after a brief rest and a bit of airplane watching 

we headed down to the bar for beer, wine and pizza. 

The pizza was large but it was the closest we have come upon to being the Americanized version of pizza.