Travel date: June 6, 2019
The sad truth is, I’ll always remember the National Maritime Museum as the place where we were totally exhausted and overwhelmed, trying to figure out what had happened to the credit card Dave had just realized he’d lost somewhere on the trip over and how to get a replacement. The exhaustion, of course, was temporary, and the credit card was an easy problem to solve…but at the time both things seemed bigger than they really were and made our short visit to the museum less fun than it should have been.
And this is really unfair, because it’s a great museum! So it gets a post anyway!
In fact, there was some part of me that thought maybe we were going to have the time and energy for a whole, amazing day in Greenwich (for this is where the National Maritime Museum is). We would go see the Prime Meridian and the Royal Observatory! We would see the Cutty Sark and that park with the deer in it and eat lunch at one of the half a dozen restaurants I had on my list! Greenwich sounds so fun!
Instead, we were very relieved to get an e-mail from our Airbnb letting us know that we could check in two hours earlier than we’d thought, and we spent a couple of hours wearily stumbling through the maritime museum before heading to the house.
We picked this museum as our first day stop because it was more or less on the way from London City Airport to our rental house in Kennington, because it was free, and because it had a coatroom where we could check our bags while we were there. But it would, as in my fantasy first day, be a great stop in a full day visit to Greenwich. 2-3 fully awake hours would likely be enough to make a pretty thorough visit.
It was easy to get to the museum from the airport via the Docklands Light Rail:
We spent some of our time at the little cafe there, having caffeinated drinks and making phone calls about the missing credit card. Abe is smiling, but note the bags under his eyes:
And, aside from that, we weren’t very organized in our touring. We tried to be, but we just weren’t in the right mental state for it, so we wandered aimlessly instead and found many cool things. There’s a giant map of the world right next to the cafe:
There are these guys:
There are kids’ play areas (a couple of different ones–one more for very young toddlers, one for somewhat older kids), and different galleries with cool ocean-y stuff and a good many interactive exhibits:
I can’t remember what Abe was writing down here. He was supposed to answer some sort of question. He got pretty into it:
Also, I remember there being quite a few places to sit down, which I found very nice.
So there you go, Maritime Museum–you are an excellent museum, and we’ll have to come back and see you again sometime when we’re less tired!
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