Cambridge Capers

Today we spent the morning in Cambridge. It was a rather strange city in that the city centre was quite small and it seemed to be dominated by the university. There were students everywhere completing their final exams and bike riders everywhere. We caught the bus into the city as there is almost no parking in the centre and it was remarkable how the bus driver negotiated the narrow streets and pushbikes. Hardly anyone had helmets on including the little kids on the back of bikes.
There were lots of grand buildings.

We walked along the line of famous colleges.

Christ's college

Lots of medieval streets again

Trinity College.

Kings College

And we thought Ashley was clever driving the fire truck in our streets. These streets are so narrow.

We spent quite a bit of time in the famous round church, the church of the Holy Sepulchre. The round part of the church is Norman and was built in 1130. It was modelled on the round church built in Jerusalem by Constantine.

Beautiful bird outside the church

The church now hosts an exhibition about the Christian heritage of Britain and it was very good.
We walked down to the river which runs behind many of the colleges. There were lots of punts on the river.

I stayed on in the town centre and Geoff caught the bus back to pick up the car to go onto Duxford.
Geoff's report of his afternoon.
I wrongly assumed that the number 1 bus that took us in to Cambridge would take me back to where I got on. No such luck, the number 1 bus has 2 routes so I got a hour and a half's tour of the grim housing estates in the opposite direction losing valuable time at IWM Duxford.
Finally got there, it is just huge and is a working airfield unlike Hendon I visited about a month ago. As well as warplanes representing 100 years of military aviation. They were offering flights in vintage aircraft I didn't enquire the cost.

There is an huge collection of land warfare vehicles many set up in displays.

The display spans WW1 to the present including some land rovers.

In WW1 most transport was horse drawn however some new fangled buses were pressed into service

The WW2 display was moving so many ordinary people like my mum lived through very difficult times and just got on with winning the war.

This rotting Cold War bomber reminded me of the ruined Norman castles that had be made redundant by the invention of the cannon what a waste of resources.

The collection of aircraft in the main display just huge.